GE in a Global Context

Dr. Jose Dalisay Jr.

I think we will all agree that the loudest wake-up call for a strong or stronger GE program came from the last election, in which massive disinformation played a key role in determining who won. That implied a huge problem in terms of both knowledge and discernment on the part of our students, our faculty, and our people at large—a problem with profound implications and consequences, and therefore also profound causes that we have to study and address within our areas of competence.

This didn’t happen just in the Philippines. In the United States, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and many other places, there has been a clear and alarming shift to populist conservatism and authoritarianism. It might be easier to say “a shift to the right,” but that reduces things to the old bipolarity between political right and left, with lots of confusion in between, and even at both ends. What we need to ask is, how did we come to this pass, and how does general education—or the lack of it—factor in it?

I happen to be in California this very moment, visiting our daughter, so I’ll use that as an excuse to raise a few points about GE in a global context particularly from the American experience, although again I have to emphasize that this is happening not only in America but around the world.

I’ll begin by pointing out that 35 years ago, the philosopher Allan Bloom caused a huge stir in American education by publishing his book The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), subtitled How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, in which he deplored the departure of American higher education from the old tradition of reading the “Great Books” and the appreciation of classical music. To Bloom—the quintessential old-school, nattily-dressed professor who loved everything French but who himself rose out of humble origins—the Sixties were a cultural disaster. He came under attack by student radicals in Cornell and later resigned and decamped to Chicago, where he was hailed by some as a genius and described by others as “a grumpy guru” and less kindly, by one of his own professors, as “a bloody lunatic.”

Bloom argued, somewhat paradoxically, that for democracy to survive, it had to be led by an intellectual elite steeped in the finest traditions of Western thought. He himself did not mind being called an “elitist.” He was a cultural conservative—he would deride the black liberation and feminist movements as examples of a false and vulgar egalitarianism—and yet he championed what he called “liberal education,” which was essentially a syllabus of Western classics, which he saw as the way to salvation and to essential, universal truths. Interestingly and strangely enough, yet another Bloom, Harold Bloom (no relation), based at Yale, would come out seven years later with a book on The Western Canon, which he meant to counter the academic and intellectual drift toward what he called “The School of Resentment,” meaning writers and scholars who sought to imbue literature with a social and political agenda.

Not surprisingly, Allan Bloom was savaged by his peers, who called him out for his prejudices and his conceits. Harold Bloom received his share of pushback from critics, not in the least for his attack on multiculturalism and historicism as the “balkanization” of literature.

Both Blooms are now dead, but their arguments have been appropriated (and some say bastardized) by another generation of critics, editorialists, and politicians in search of intellectual or academic justifications for their agenda.

I’m going to turn away from the Blooms for a minute to talk about a couple of other hot topics of discussion on American and global campuses and media, so you will see where my thoughts about general education are veering toward.

The first is the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” whereby certain people or groups of people are identified and then strongly opposed or even vilified for their expression of views deemed unacceptable. It’s an act of public shaming, and also an assertion by those practicing it of their own political standards. Beyond individual discourse, it’s a socially organized campaign of rejection—a cultural boycott, if you will—aimed not only at specific targets but at whatever they represent, of which they happen to be the visible and vocal icons at the moment.

The term itself has been around for about four decades now from its origins in popular music, but only in recent years has “cancel culture” entered the social and political mainstream, especially in the context of the so-called “culture wars” now tearing American society apart between the supporters of so-called traditional values and those claiming a right to alternative ideas, beliefs, and lifestyles. Deftly, both major American political parties have reached into these cultural biases for their base support. (In this connection and parenthetically, it would be good to ask ourselves if Philippine politics can be explained by any kind of cultural or ideological dichotomy.)

But like a double-edged sword, “cancel culture”—like that other term, “fake news”—has been used by both parties against the other, depending on who’s at the receiving end. If you can’t fight it, appropriate it. Even liberals are divided about it: is it a manifestation of agency, especially for the oppressed, or does it muzzle free speech and breed intellectual intolerance?

The other term I’d like to draw attention to, perhaps more relatable in its American context, is “critical race theory,” about which there has been renewed debate. An academic term and concept from the 1990s, CRT is another battlefield in the culture wars, with conservatives arguing that it demonizes white Americans and actively diminishes if not distorts their place in American society, while its proponents see it as a historical corrective, badly needed in a time of resurgent racial prejudice and even violence. These predispositions—like other aspects of the culture wars—have very practical and even devastating effects. In some places, they have led to book banning and voter disenfranchisement, as politicians have sought to codify and enforce their beliefs through laws that pander to prevailing prejudices.

The conservative resistance to critical race theory—indeed, to anything that threatens to diminish the hegemony of the white male, including abortion rights—is just another example of how brazen and aggressive the current drive to roll back the gains of postwar liberalism has become. The civil rights movement (now embodied in Black Lives Matter), feminism, environmentalism, academic freedom, a free press, and such other shibboleths of liberal democracy are now all under threat in America, and in other ways elsewhere. Donald Trump’s election and possible return to the presidency seemingly legitimized and encouraged this backlash against what are now ridiculed as “wokeness” or “political correctness.” The American mind is closing again, though not in the way Allan Bloom conceived it.

According to a recent study by American PEN, the writers’ organization, between July 2021 and June 2022, there were 2,532 instances of individual bans, which covered 1,648 unique books, at the school district level. More than 40 percent of the banned titles involved LGBTQ themes; 22 percent had sexual content; and 21 percent addressed racism.

Now, to return to the Philippines and to UP. Many of the things I’ve mentioned here have their local counterpart—the book banning and more broadly, the revision of history to purge it of important narratives of oppression and injustice. Our situation has its particular differences, most significantly issues of class instead of race, but the impact of politics on education is clearly similar. Our ideal of liberal education—one that opens minds and values truth, employing critical thinking to get there—is under threat by a political regime with despotism in its DNA. This is a regime that will not hesitate to use its administrative and coercive powers—such as the budget, the selection of academic leaders, and the revision of curricula—to enforce its views on a generation of young and impressionable Filipinos.

How is UP to respond to this threat, while trying to keep its head afloat in an environment increasingly hostile to academic freedom? How can our GE program contribute to the academic resistance to the closing of the Filipino mind?

Contrary to popular misimpression, I will argue that it is not explicitly UP’s mission to produce rebels and nonconformists, although that will be a natural and valuable consequence of many a UP education. Rather, it is to produce critical thinkers in the service of the Filipino people, graduates with a sense of commitment to national development through their respective competencies, with a keen appreciation of our national history and culture, and able to subject issues of national importance to critical and scientific inquiry.

When our faculty and students challenge existing dogmas and practices—not everyone will, or will feel they need to—then they run the risk of being tagged as rebels and subversives, but that has always been the way of universities and of the intellectual life. Mastery of the subject also means the capability and the willingness to change it, so we take these charges in stride as proof of our efficacy.

But producing critical thinkers cannot simply mean replacing one set of settled beliefs with another. We have to teach our students how to think and to argue their own way to freedom, how to ask the right questions, how to find and evaluate evidence, how to determine where our national interests lie, and how find points of convergence between the personal and the national.

GE can’t be just about correcting history, or plumbing our students’ minds full of it. Filling the vacuum is the first step, but it also has to enable them to decide what to do with what they learn. And very importantly, our graduates have to be able to communicate what they know with other Filipinos in other situations, to get beyond the echo chamber. This involves creativity and resourcefulness in both media and messaging.

I would be happy if our GE program directed our students to arrive at a working definition of some very important terms: freedom, justice, democracy, nationalism, truth, history, science, culture, art, faith, success, happiness, beauty, equality, opportunity, values, and ethics, among others. (Dr. Mike Tan, I think, will speak to the matter of ethics later.) Whether we’re teaching literature, history, or natural science, there should be ample opportunity to contextualize and discuss these concepts, to emphasize the interconnectedness of things.

It will also be helpful if we were able to foster an atmosphere of intellectual tolerance and civil argumentation, to distinguish between tolerance and acceptance or surrender, and to remember the difference between Twitter (which has its uses) and academic discourse. Our students look up to us as models not merely of thinking but also of behavior. We can be passionate and partisan propagandists and combatants when we have to, and many of us have become media-savvy out of sheer necessity, but our students also have to appreciate the fact that quiet but substantial scholarship and research is also a form of combat against falsehood, prejudice, and ignorance. If we want to teach respect, then we should prove ourselves worthy of it, through our professional demeanor and patient consistency—on top, of course, of sharpness of mind.

Can Philippine democracy best be served and saved by an intellectual elite, as Allan Bloom proposed for America? Only if that elite—and yes, we are one, whether we acknowledge it or not—only if that elite reconnects with the people it has been alienated from, and with our own intellectual traditions. Plato and Shakespeare will be of more value to us beyond the classroom if they can help us help our students sort out right from wrong, and good from bad. A good GE program, in sum, is less about what to think than how to think, and how to apply that thinking to one’s own life and future, for the good of all.

Thank you.