UMVA has learned that a proposed overhaul of the General Education (GE) curriculum in the Philippines has sparked intense debate, with far-reaching implications for the country's education system and labor market.
The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) initially proposed reducing the GE curriculum from 36 units to 18, starting in School Year 2026-2027, citing the need to align university outcomes with labor market realities increasingly shaped by AI. However, the plan drew immediate criticism from academics and the public, forcing CHED to delay implementation to 2028.
CHED Chairperson Shirley Agrupis cited the need for more time to analyze and study the different manifestations, but this decision raises fundamental questions about the logic of education policymaking under conditions of rapid technological change. If urgent curricular realignment is needed to meet shifting labor market needs, then a two-year postponement appears to undercut the very rationale of the reform.
The unpredictable nature of labor markets, shaped by creative destruction and technological disruption, makes it challenging for regulators to predict and plan education around future labor market conditions. The example of "knocker-ups" in industrial Britain, who were made redundant by the invention of alarm clocks, illustrates the limitations of centralized planning.
Many economists, including Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion, have emphasized the problem of labor-market forecasting, which rests on rigid assumptions about an ever-changing world filled with technological disruption and occupational substitution. Aghion explains how transformative technologies, such as AI, are "General Purpose Technologies" that are resistant to centralized prediction.
The Philippines' industries, which currently enjoy a comparative advantage, are precisely those most exposed to technological disruption from AI. Furthermore, curriculum revisions within CHED take, on average, 11 years to materialize, which means that by the time the reform package reaches schools, the labor landscape it was designed to address may no longer exist.
The fatal conceit in CHED's approach lies in treating the labor market as an engineering puzzle solvable by a committee, rather than an unpredictable landscape that can only be navigated through adaptability. The allure of central planning blinds us from its inability to predict and plan education around future labor market conditions and rapid technological disruption.
No central bureaucracy can adequately aggregate the dispersed and rapidly changing information embedded in millions of uncoordinated decisions made by parents, students, teachers, administrators, employers, technologists, and others. Even international evidence points to the frailties of long-range labor-market forecasting, with the IMF finding that labor-market projections are repeatedly revised in response to shocks and structural changes.
The current GE framework has been in place for nearly a decade, and entrenched interests have inevitably formed around it, raising the transaction costs of any attempt at reform. Educators who depend on the framework for their livelihood will fight to retain it, making it challenging to implement a new framework.
CHED's arbitrary power over the GE framework creates a "cumulative effect" on potential reforms, making it more likely that reframing the current GE curriculum will be shaped by conflicting interests rather than intellectual or scientific grounds. This highlights the inherent dangers of interventionism and raises questions about how to reconcile the mismatch between the GE curriculum and contemporary labor-market realities.
