13/05/2026
A STATEMENT OF PROTEST ON THE PROPOSED REFRAMED GENERAL EDUCATION CURRICULUM OF THE COMMISSION ON HIGHER EDUCATION
Issued by the Faculty of the Department of History and Philosophy
College of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Baguio
12 May 2026
We write as historians and philosophers, as faculty of a state university whose mandate has always been to serve not only the nation but the region and its peoples, including communities whose histories have been systematically excluded from the national narrative. We stand in solidarity with faculty, students, and all academic institutions and organizations in the Philippines that have formally raised objections to this proposal. But we also write from our own position as a department since the Commission on Higher Educationโs proposed Reframed General Education (GE) Curriculum, disclosed in a draft memorandum dated 16 April 2026, threatens to make the exclusion of History and Ethics as a GE permanent and curricular in the higher education system. That threat is not abstract to us. It is immediate and serious.
I. REGARDING THE LACK OF GENUINE CONSULTATION
The 5 May 2026 (Tuesday) Public Hearing on the Proposed Policies, Standards, and Guidelines for the Reframed GE Curriculum was the first time many educators like us had the avenue to express our concerns regarding the Reframed GE Curriculum that has been developed. Given that the CHED Technical Panel for General Education (TPGE) has already targeted Academic Year 2026-2027 for pilot testing of this revision, how can we be certain that the concerns raised by stakeholders during the public consultation will have been genuinely addressed before the pilot testing? We therefore seek that the pilot testing be postponed in lieu of genuine consultation and inclusive reiteration of the proposed GE curriculum, representative of the academic community beyond the National Capital Region, to ensure the legitimacy of the revision process.
II. THE MERGER OF HISTORY AND RIZAL AND THE SUBSUMPTION OF ETHICS: DIMINISHMENT DISGUISED AS REFORM
The proposed replacement of two mandatory and distinct courses, โReadings in Philippine Historyโ and the โLife, Works, and Writings of Jose Rizal,โ with a single combined course titled โRizal and Philippine Studiesโ is, in our assessment, not integration. It is erasure. Republic Act No. 1425 is unambiguous: it mandates the teaching of Rizalโs life, works, and writings as a distinct curricular requirement. The operative word is distinct. Subsuming Rizal within a broader Philippine Studies framework does not fulfill this mandate. It absorbs it. A component is not a course.
Neither is a Philippine Studies course a substitute for Philippine History. It can encompass language, culture, heritage, and tradition. What it cannot provide is the sustained, methodologically rigorous, historiographically grounded encounter with the Philippine past that a dedicated History course makes possible. Here in the Cordillera, we know this distinction with particular urgency. The history of the Igorot peoples, of the resistance to Marcos-era development aggression, of the Chico River Dam opposition and its martyrs, of the ongoing struggle for ancestral domain recognition, none of these appear in a generic Philippine Studies framework. They appear, if at all, only when a course is specifically, methodologically, and critically historical.
Philippine History at the university level is not a repetition of Senior High School (SHS) content. It demands cognitive maturity, critical thinking, engagement with primary sources, and the willingness to sit with evidence that does not resolve neatly. Reducing all of that to the frame of a single biography, however significant, is precisely the kind of reductionism that the discipline of History exists to resist. Rizal was a product of colonial structures, of the ilustrado class from which he belonged, of revolutionary currents he helped inspire but did not fully control. To understand Rizal without that context is to understand very little of either Rizal or the Philippine nation. Historical truth requires multiple viewpoints. It resists compression into a single lens.
Likewise, the proposal to subsume Ethics into a single-unit course titled โData, Evidence, and Ethics in a Knowledge Societyโ is not just mere โreframingโโit is the destruction of a studentโs foundation for moral reasoning and critical thinking. CHEDโs very own Vision, Mission, and Mandate states that, โpursuant to Republic Act 7722, CHED shall: [โฆ] 4. Commit to moral ascendancy that eradicates corrupt practices, institutionalizes transparency and accountability, and encourages participatory governance in the Commission and the sub-sector.โ Subsuming Ethics violates this very principle.
The removal of Ethics in favor of a more โmodernโ and โrelevantโ course focused on Data and Analytics reduces it to a mere afterthought. A secondary consideration to be regarded only after the research has already been done. This is not what Ethics is aboutโit goes beyond mere Values Education classes taught at the High School level. Ethics exists to develop not just a sense of moral responsibility and professional integrity, but also the ability to think critically about moral issues, explore theories of morality beyond simple โright or wrongโ, and navigate complex social challenges with accountability and social awareness. The student must develop these qualities as their primary way of interacting with the world.
If Ethics is to be โreorientedโ in the manner CHED seeks to do, complex discussions such as the tensions between utility-based and rights-based normative ethics, debates on moral objectivism vs moral relativism, and resolving moral dilemmas all disappear. Ethics is not a subject to be folded into footnotesโit is the discipline that asks not what the data shows, but what we owe one another and what kind of society we are building. To reduce it to a unit within a course on data and analytics is to answer those questions before they are even asked. CHED's mandate calls for moral ascendancy; that ascendancy cannot be built on a curriculum that treats moral formation as an afterthought.
III. WHY WE, AS HISTORIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS, INSIST ON HISTORY AND ETHICS IN THE GE
History and Philosophy together are the backbone of a genuinely humanistic education. Take either out, and you are left with graduates who can do things but cannot ask whether those things should be done. History, as taught at the university level, is not a recitation of what students learned in Senior High School. It is a rigorous method of inquiry, one that trains students to evaluate sources, weigh competing interpretations, and bring critical judgment to questions that do not have easy answers. Philosophy deepens this further. A student trained in the analysis of arguments, the examination of ethical claims, and the habits of careful reasoning is harder to deceive and harder to manipulate.
A graduate who cannot situate herself within her own history is not fully-equipped to participate meaningfully in a democracy. She cannot recognize when power is being abused, when the past is being falsified, or when the suffering of others has been erased from the record. In the Cordillera Region, these are not hypothetical risks. They have already materialized in the footnoting of the regionโs history in grand national narratives and in the continued silencing of the regionโs historical resistance to state oppressionโfrom the colonial period to the dictatorship. This Department exists, in part, to ensure that the students of this region are not among those left vulnerable.
V. OUR CALL TO ACTION
We call on CHED and the TPGE to act on the following:
1. Withdraw the draft memorandum dated 16 April 2026, and suspend all implementation timelines immediately. No rollout should proceed until a genuine consultative process has been completed, one that includes faculty, students, and disciplinary technical panels from all fields and all regions, not only those with access to Manila hearings.
2. Retain โReadings in Philippine Historyโ and the โLife, Works, and Writings of Jose Rizalโ as separate, mandatory, and legally distinct courses. Merging them does not fulfill the mandate of Republic Act No. 1425 and the CHED Memorandum Order No. 247 (1994). It circumvents them. Moreover, โEthics and Moral Reasoning in Everyday Lifeโ should be retained.
3. Restore ethics, literature, and the arts to the core GE program as requirements, not as institutional electives squeezed into whatever unit space remains after the mandatory courses are satisfied. A three-unit token allowance for institutional identity is not academic freedom. It is its appearance.
4. Prioritize helping institutions to enhance the delivery of the contents through professional development, strengthened pedagogical practices, and meaningful institutional investment. We believe that it is by continuously enhancing educatorโs professional competencies that existing GE courses can effectively cultivate holistic, interdisciplinary, and student-centered learning outcomes.
We make these petitions not as obstructionists but as educators who, like the CHED TPGE, also seek to address the need to holistically produce graduates who are not only technically brilliant but also socially responsible and ethically grounded. The removal of History and Ethics via a โreframeโ does not therefore match the supposed goals this Reframed GE Curriculum claims to contribute towards.
VI. CONCLUSION:
We hold that in this Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a humanistic and socially grounded General Education framework, rather than being obsolete, has become all the more important. AI and its accompanying technologies have no ethics, no culture, and no history. Those who make these technologies, however, remain human, and it is still humans who ultimately dictate their use. Therefore, to remove from the GE the content that makes us human, and more specifically, a Filipino, is to also make the outcome of our product obsolete. An outcomes-based education, therefore, contrary to what the CHED TPGE presented in the 5 May public consultation, should still take into consideration the ontology and epistemology of the content a GE course teaches, for not all kinds of content produce quality outcomes. We hold that a genuine General Education program must be holistic, critical, patriotic, and humane, and it must not be rushed, imposed, or designed without the people it is meant to serve.
END.
