Self-Integration as a Task in the General Education Curriculum

Abstract

In the metaphors that they use in describing their tasks, educators reveal the theory of mental activity that they accept or assume. The idea that in a G.E. Program, the four tasks of (a) creating literacies, (b) broadening knowledge, and stimulating (c) critical thinking and (d) creativity will come into confluence through the curriculum involves the metaphor of streams coming together into a single, inclusive stream. Several discussions of the G.E. Program in the University of the Philippines in the early 1960s have already established links between the concepts of critical thinking and creativity that allow us to integrate the two notions more closely, but also to see the idea of self-integration as an important task of G.E. Here we must go beyond the metaphor of confluence, towards a conception of the learner as simultaneously an epistemic agent and a moral agent, who actively brings into confluence in herself the elements of G.E. education.