General education

It is not true, as some have been saying, that all the subjects in the first two years of college will be moved to the last two years of basic education.

The subjects in the first two years of college belong to what is known as the General Education Curriculum (GEC). All Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are required by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to offer the subjects in the GEC. (There are a few exceptions, such as universities with charters and autonomous private HEIs.)

The current GEC will continue to be mandated until the year 2018, when the first graduates of Grade 12 will enter college. In the academic year starting 2018, the current GEC will cease to exist. That does not mean, however, that there will no longer be General Education (GE) in HEIs.

CHED’s Technical Panel on General Education (TPGE) is conducting consultations on a revised GEC (for lack of a better word, let us call it RGEC, R for revised). RGEC will consist of only 36 units, roughly equivalent to a year’s work. Unlike GEC, however, RGEC need not be taken only in freshman year. RGEC is envisioned to be distributed throughout the student’s stay in an HEI.

The change in the placement of GE in college will now allow other CHED Technical Panels to include major subjects in freshman year. This is extremely important in Bologna-affected courses, such as engineering and architecture, where students have to take subjects that take four or five years to master.

It is also important for those coming from Senior High School (Grades 11 and 12). Students in SHS who take the academic stream should not pause for a year to take only GE subjects but should continue to hone their skills in their preferred discipline. For example, a high school student opting to take the Science, Technology, and Engineering career pathway will take up calculus in SHS; this student should go straight to whatever major course needs calculus, in order to be able to apply high school knowledge immediately to college level demands.

RGEC, unlike GEC, will be completely interdisciplinary, in keeping with higher education trends around the world. RGEC will address 21st century issues, because students will eventually be working in this century, not in the 20th century (when all of their teachers were born). Remember that incoming college students in 2018 will have been born in or after 2000.

Let us take a simple example. In my time (which was the last century), you applied for a job by looking at the classified ads printed in a newspaper, writing and sending a typewritten or computer-printed resume, and having an interview face to face. Today, according to computer statistics, 100 million jobs are offered and filled through social networking (primarily Linkedin). The practice of consulting the classified ads section of a newspaper is almost dead. Even today, many jobseekers are interviewed over the Web (with software such as Skype or FaceTime), saving both jobseekers and companies tremendous travel expenses.

Clearly, such electronic means of finding and getting jobs changes the format of personal resumes. A simple example involves having a link in a resume that automatically brings up a website or a portfolio for the interviewer to study. Preparing yourself for an interview in which only your face and words will be available for the interviewer involves different skills from the old way of walking straight, power dressing, and so on. Even just voice modulation (because web microphones do not faithfully reproduce sounds) has to be taught and learned.

Most important of all, college graduates will be very different from high school (even SHS) graduates. High school graduates will be able to get only middle-level jobs, not upper management or CEO positions. This is the main difference between a high school education and a college education. A college education, once we properly configure our curriculum, should prepare students for well-paying, high-level jobs in companies or should prepare them to start businesses that require a lot of sophisticated technical knowledge.

Some college graduates should even be able to become cabinet members and even presidents, just to name jobs that do not require specific fields of specialization. If specialized knowledge and skills are needed, only college graduates can be doctors, teachers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and so on.

All kinds of studies have shown that, at the highest levels of governments and multinational corporations, it is college graduates with strong backgrounds in GE that succeed.

Of course, getting a good job or a good position is not the only purpose of going to college. There is also self-improvement, by which we mean having a strong sense of self and of other human beings. Only GE can give that kind of education to students. Major subjects are necessarily confined to improving particular skills in particular disciplines. GE, in contrast, is not bound to any discipline but covers all disciplines.

This is the main reason the subjects in the RGEC are interdisciplinary (not just multidisciplinary). Who will teach these subjects? That will have to wait for another column. –Isagani Cruz (The Philippine Star)