The draft Policies, Standards, and Guidelines (PSG) on the reframed General Education (GE) Curriculum reduces the mandated GE curriculum to 18 units, 15 units for five GE courses (including Labor, Ethics, and Rizal) and 3 units for an institutional core, a modicum that every higher education institution must comply, and another 18 units for all autonomous institutions or a total of 36 units. Schools like the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University, Ateneo de Davao University, among others, can choose and design additional core courses to offer, subject to the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) quality controls.
There is a very troubling provision in the proposal, one that goes beyond the function of the commission. Based on the draft, half of the GE courses (36 units) offered until today will be gone, which means the de facto firing of all teachers handling courses that CHED is removing. The other contentious provision in the proposal is that any faculty handling a GE course must have an MA as a minimum requirement, which means that all teachers with no master’s by the time the CHED Memorandum Order is approved and fully implemented by 2027, will have to look for new jobs.
Many young teachers, including myself, and most of my bright classmates, went straight to teaching after graduation from college as “probationary” teachers, meaning contractual. Of course, it is expected that we have to get an MA. Some of classmates were actually teaching as part-timers while studying law. I reckon that most of us were hired because of our “potential”. Of course, nothing beats experience, but denying a young graduate the chance to teach is not really about depriving this person a job.
In reality, this inexperienced graduate will be able to find a different type of work after graduating “with honors”. The problem is that the provision deprives future students the potential to learn from someone who would have been committed to teaching, which some believe to be a vocation because the pay is low but your spirit remains high. The point is that young teachers are actually given the opportunity to study for free through scholarships and faculty development programs. This is something that stable and big universities can do because they have the resources and they sometimes also offer the graduate program.
Now, if schools will only hire those already with an MA, then a young graduate might choose to work elsewhere or study law rather than teach in college. Some people at CHED can’t see beyond a piece of paper. They think that a master’s diploma is proof of quality when the meaning of excellence, Aristotle tells us, is not really about outcomes. It is a habit, or translated in layman’s terms, you do the things you love because you are committed to the same as a matter of principle and not simply because there is a piece of paper stamped with “quality assurance.”
A university or even a small college is not a factory but a place where learning is supposed to take place. This means that it is a place where people wonder and ask questions and not just follow orders from a supervisor. It is a place where you see the world beyond mere numbers while understanding too the meaning of numbers yet you are critical enough to realize that you are a human being who can read the works of James Joyce, Sartre, Hegel, Camus, Emily Dickenson, Wittgenstein, Kant, and Homer.
In fact, CHED is not solving the problem of Philippine education. It is creating more problems and headaches for administrators making this country not only the biggest supplier of global labor but the laughing stock of the world for its regressive approach to education. Now, the questions that must be asked are the following: 1. Would CHED be flexible enough to allow contractual teachers without an MA to handle the courses as long as they are enrolled in a graduate program? Will CHED help schools that does not have enough resources to pay for teachers with MAs? These are important things that CHED needs to answer as it hears the voices from various stakeholders pending this gargantuan shift in educational policy in the country.
