The parable that is general education in the university or mal-academia at U.P.V.

By Prof. Tom Talledo

Second of three parts

The Erosion of General Education as Academic Offering

The three tales of mirrors were to me the telling kernel of the General Education in the University but its significance can only be grasped in the manner of a camera obscura, that is, what is upside down is put right side up.

For enough time must pass for my experiences to get distilled and to invest tough efforts to seriously reflect and self-criticize. I maybe the anchor of what transpires inside the classroom as an umpire yet I can only do so much. If my wish is for education be lively then the atmosphere of engaging restlessness must be where students teach me and my ego is open to learn from them. Alas, this is easier supposed than done if my personal idols are anxious self-preservation and careerism. I was not hesitant to eat humble pie, as figure of speech goes, for I chose the road of audacity as a teacher activist, as part of our university’s academic union, and to speak in public about urgent issues that bedevil our society. And I was affirmed having been red-tagged just few years ago, but under trying time, I considered that as my purple badge of courage.

True, courage is an important stock at time of crisis and the capacity to perceive the larger panorama of events as not to get bogged down by pettifogging. The cultivation of broadness of vision is one of the goals of UP’s General Education Program. And to consider the developmental stages of the General Education course offerings as learners and spreaders of knowledge in the University, we would be modestly conscious of our subject position. It is assuring to subdue our misplaced know-it-all arrogance if we are aware where are we coming from.

The General Education as constellation of course offerings in the University were formalized by President Vicente Sinco sometime in 1958. In considering the General Education, President Sinco wanted to address “the restrictive compartmentalization of knowledge and intellectual pursuits,” as “to arrest the danger of community and national disintegration” through “formation of the ideal citizen of democracy.” These were words from his pompous speech warning against uninhibited pursuit of specializations. But I reread Sinco differently, spoken within the historical context of the Cold War in the 1950s, his “ideal citizen of democracy” accentuated the ideological division then between the Iron Curtain and the distinction between regimes of “Communist Totalitarianism” and “Democracy”. It is as if UP General Education was some sort of vaccine that will immunize students and teachers from enticements of technically oriented Socialist-Communist thoughts. And the injections of 63-units Humanist courses in the curriculum was a must to be the “ideal citizen of democracy”.

The Great Books Program constituted the large part of the General Education syllabus. These are compilations of thoughts by Western thinkers exemplified in the 54-volume set edited by Robert Maynard and Mortimer Adler and published by Hutchins as Great Books of the Western World. The thoughts selected are staggering: from Plato to Aquinas to Darwin and Marx. An intimate acquaintance with these ideas supposedly shapes a learner to be a well-rounded “Renaissance person” yet there were no representatives from Asia and Africa nor from women. Such absence or neglect or blindness is symptomatic of an Orientalist cultivation of citizens in the University. Today’s realization of that predicament emphasizes that Filipino learners drink from Western spring of intellect because as a people we failed to dig up the well of our own.

But toward 1960s up to early 1970s, when the global movements of decolonization burst forth, the colonized societies such as Algeria, Congo, Indonesia, Vietnam, and others strongly registered anti-imperialist nationalism for independence. The winds of change came to be storms of upheavals in both theory and in praxis. Armed liberation movements and counter consciousness initiatives were founded. Guerilla fronts were opened and active critical appraisals of socio-historical orthodoxies were undertaken. Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), Ernesto Guevara’s Radical writings on guerilla warfare, politics, and revolution (collected, various dates) and Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution (1971) belonged to this genre of critical appraisals. Amusing but true for it is recognizable that crisis situations led to questionings that provoked creativity in ideas and actions. Ancient Greeks called this peripeteia – which for me is a charming reversal of circumstances.

Alas, it was exciting time in the University of the Philippines. The beleaguered nationalism of Claro M. Recto, Lorenzo Tanada and Jose P. Laurel came to have a ready audience. Outside and inside classrooms there was electric enthusiasm to question prescribed textbooks, to discuss topics outside the syllabus and search-to-study materials critical of Anglo-Saxon textual canons. In a published book of Jose Maria Sison’s collected writings, he included an interesting exhibit: Joema wrote a complaint letter to former UPV Chancellor Dionisia A. Rola, who was then Chair of English Department, UP Diliman. Rola as Chair imposed to include in Departmental syllabus formalist essays that emphasized form rather than content. However, Joema as an Instructor saw it as Rola’s surreptitious favoring her religious denominational taste inside a secular university. Nationalist content of knowledge over prescribed form was the great expectation. For by that time, the total of number of units for students to earn credit was 42 in the General Education — an arena of struggle between what was old and what was new.

The latest but most wily tinkering of the General Education Program in my estimate was under Alfredo E. Pascual, 2011 to 2017. The number of GE units was left to the discretion of the University Council for each autonomous unit to finally decide. Since I attended several conferences that arrived at consensuses, the trenchant debates moved around on the re-formulation of the Program’s goals, on the favored medium of instruction and on the prescribed number of units in the student’s study plan. Those were specific and technical matters which sounded like some scholastic arguments in Church Councils and uselessly ate up a lot of time. It was wily since there was no frank admission by the factotums of the Pascual Administration to cut-to-fit the University’s curriculum to suit the metrics of international academic accreditation. The end goal really is for the University to occupy a high ranking in reputable published surveys with such obsession that exceeds human devotion to a golden calf. Submission to international standard to produce appropriate brain workers as demanded by the global market of labor weighs heavily on further on the erosion of General Education into 21 or 27 units now. No longer the University qualifies as critic of Philippine society in the by-words of presidencies under Francisco A. Nemenzo, Sr. and Salvador P. Lopez – but now it is like a factory since Alfredo Pascual (the current Secretary of Trade and Industry of Marcos, Jr.) is one unabashed mediocre man of commerce.

After four decades of observation and service, I can say that given the proclivities of mice and men and women reigning as academic authorities in the University, the robust spirit of General Education somehow goes into imperceptible erosion. It undergoes erosion since its institutional self-understanding resembles that of a monstrous Artificial Intelligence (AI) operating as devourer of souls. And this erosion stays unnoticed, misunderstood, and perfunctorily dismissed by us who are so enmeshed with our self-conceits. That is why General Education cannot not mirror our faults, our wounds, our pains as solemn learners and spreaders of knowledge in the University. Hence it was shown: Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Q.E.D.).