Ask any Filipino why education matters, and you'll probably hear the same answer: para makakuha ng magandang trabaho. From elementary school to college graduation, we've been taught that education is our ticket to employment, stability, and a better life. Stalk a university's page and see how it measures its own success; and the answer often is its board exam passing rates, how it ranks in licensure exams, or how fresh-grad alumni land jobs. None of these metrics are evil in themselves. A nursing graduate who passes the licensure exam and finds stable work has genuinely succeeded at something real. The problem is that they've quietly become the only thing that matters.

It's a pattern that's happening to education everywhere: institutions increasingly run like businesses, judged by countable outputs, financially entangled with the industries they're supposed to be preparing students to enter.

But the pressure to make education "pay off" stems from everyday reality— it's the mother who makes ends meet so that her nursing student daughter can graduate, get a job, and get out of poverty. And it shows up in policy, too. For example, the Commission on Higher Education's proposals to strip General Education/Humanities-related courses from the college curriculum. This proposal is the conclusion of a system that has already decided those subjects are decoration, not substance.

For decades, this education system worked. Companies wanted efficient graduates. Now, AI exposes the flaw; companies can increasingly automate efficiency. If education is merely job preparation, AI is becoming the better graduate. We fear that our education system's established idea of education is employability. Students are trained to be good at exactly the kind of thing AI is now good at too. But we might have a human fighting chance.

The historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in the 1960s about American anti-intellectualism, drew a distinction that has aged strangely well into the AI era: the difference between intelligence and intellect.

Intelligence, in his account, is practical and goal-directed — the capacity to solve a defined problem efficiently, to hit a stated target. It's a quality we readily attribute to animals, and now, to machines.

Intellect is something else: the restless, critical, meaning-making part of a mind that questions its own assumptions, that isn't satisfied with a correct answer but wants to know what the question was really asking, and why. A person, Hofstadter argued, can be highly intelligent and yet fundamentally uncurious — and someone without formal credentials can possess a sharper intellect than a roomful of degree-holders.

They excel at reproducing and recombining existing ideas but are inherently biased toward what has already been written, making them more followers of prevailing patterns than originators of genuinely new paradigms.

That distinction of intelligence and intellect reframes our understanding of AI. Large language models (LLMs) are, by any reasonable definition, intelligent: they execute narrow, well-specified tasks — summarizing, coding, pattern-finding — with a competence that keeps climbing. What they do not do, at least not yet, is intellect. Large language models are trained on human-generated text to predict the most probable next word. As a result, they become "average" --followers of prevailing patterns-- because they internalize the statistical patterns, conventions, and assumptions of their training data. They do not sit with ambiguity for its own sake, form an independent judgment about what matters, or generate a genuinely new way of framing a problem no one asked them to solve.

If our schools have spent a generation optimizing students for intelligence — such as hitting the benchmark, passing the board exam, executing the procedure — then AI is threatening to replace the specific slice of human capability we happened to build our entire education system around.

Our classrooms often reward intelligence—not intellect. The system incentivizes it. For example, in Araling Panlipunan, I still remember classes only discussing "When did Spain colonize the Philippines?" instead of "Why do Filipinos often forget the effects of colonization?" Or in Literature classes, questions like "What part of the chicken was served in the first chapter of Noli me Tangere?" prevail instead of "What fears does Rizal expose that still exist today?"

None of this is a knock on teachers. Most Filipino teachers I know want their students to question, to wonder, to think for themselves. What they're up against is a structure — standardized tests, bloated syllabi, institutional incentives — that rewards recall and procedure far more reliably than it rewards a good, unruly question. Teachers are not the ones who built that structure. They're navigating it, often against their own instincts about what learning should be.

Ultimately, this is not an argument that technical skill is worthless, or that board exams and employment outcomes should stop mattering to Filipino families who need their children to find stable work. However, our education system should prioritize intellect too, i.e., “the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind... intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines... intellect, being a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men” as defined by Hofstadter.

The productive response to AI, then, is to let AI take over more of the narrowly intelligent work, freeing space in classrooms for the capacities that remain stubbornly, distinctively human: forming a judgment, tolerating uncertainty, asking why a problem is a problem in the first place, imagining an alternative no one has specified in advance.

That's a harder thing to measure than a passing rate. It won't fit cleanly into a CHED memorandum or a university ranking. But it's the actual purpose education was supposed to serve before we quietly swapped it out for a job-training program.

We have spent decades building an education system whose highest ambition was to produce intelligent, efficient workers. If schools continue treating education as job training, we shouldn't be surprised when AI graduates as Valedictorian.

The Frontman