The proposed reforms in our education system hit the front pages of the
The Malta Independent this week. They must have seemed a bit ill timed for all those students who are having to resit all subjects because of one fail mark in our equivalent of A levels, a cruel and stupid practice that puts proposed reforms in the little shade we have. Who devised all this madness anyway? It wasn’t always like this. Are our exam boards that short of cash? Are our administrators that out of touch, that much into cruelty?
So children have to spend weekends in sweltering 40° temperatures studying things they have passed because we dictate they must have all their main passes on one certificate. The news of reform must have seemed irrelevant to many Independent readers who shed blood sweat and tears to educate their children out of the State system anyway. They must have seemed non existent to all those parents who are making their children go to private lessons this summer, be it in a subject where they are perceived to be weak, typically Maths or Maltese, simply because they are so scared of their children not getting into university with a Maltese Matsec which is grossly exaggerated in terms of syllabus, content and ambition, and which most of us, including those from Maltese speaking families fail!
The trouble is we have a top down grandiose way of trying to resolve things in this country. We manage change as if we are a big country and do not take advantage of our smallness to act quickly, locally and righteously. We act slowly, legally, bombastically, and people are very, very annoyed about it. Annoyed because things are good but they should be and could be much, much, better. People don’t want to hear that we have a power station and high IT capabilities. They believe we should have anyway. They look at where we are failing, our still terrible roads, our cruel overburdensome education approach, and our system of patronage, which has insidiously replaced the corruption system of the seventies and eighties, but is still just as bad. Why haven’t we heard any announcement that the Matsec system is to have its content halved? Those who are in power today passed exams that were so very much easier than what our kids are enduring. For what purpose exactly are we doing this to our children? What are we waiting for to change it?
What are we waiting for to remove the conflict of interest between those who set papers and put their own books on the syllabus for students to study? Wouldn’t it be better for our students to do foreign exams since the link between our lecturers, examiners students etcetera can never be clean and dispassionate?
The trouble is we seem to be going back to the socializing, centralizing ways of the seventies and eighties where ministers made announcements and we waited with bated breadth, where ministers’ articles were read, where parliamentary debates were listened to. All that is in the past. We have grown up. People just look at the gross ridiculousness, inequalities, and inefficiencies in our education system and vote with their feet. Is there really a Bill coming up where ministers are going to be given the power, or more power to control entities than is the case now by giving them policies? I just hope this will be shelved whoever is in government.
If Boards are going to just be puppets of ministers eliminate them, and the expense of having them, altogether. This is not why people went from red to blue. They wanted to get away from the minister rubberstamping everything. Even the cases making our newspapers lately smell mostly of this ministerial inclination to try and run entities, or to interfere.
It’s true. Being a minister is a difficult role. Entities come under your ministry and you do not sit on the Board. But with good reason. Ministers are political. They shouldn’t decide on certain issues because they are bound by their political allegiance and considerations first and foremost. Board members have different allegiances, or they should have.
No system is perfect, but while on the whole although I disagree with Eddie being appointed President, I think the style of decentralising was a good one and we should back-pedal very fast on any measures to centralise more and further – some say Austin Gatt style but who really knows? The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the pudding tastes decidedly off.
True the central tenet of the proposed reforms – to have more of an assessment-based system than an exam based one, is a good thing. True some of the new proposed structures may improve things, though it looks like we are again creating new bodies instead of adding some life to existing ones. Again this approach is endemic. Instead of giving additional resources where they are sorely needed to improve an entity, we create another one, promising new resources for that entity. So I guess we create jobs, we appoint people who are very grateful to run these new bodies and our system of patronage goes on, with not enough or commensurate improvement on the ground.
Assessment is fine but it will be even more dependent on who people like and dislike. That is very worrying in the Maltese context.
Favouritism is rife everywhere and never more so in a tiny island like ours where even trails of wrongdoing cannot ever be followed through properly, or ways are found to circumvent it, if there are some strong connections, familial or otherwise. Didn’t friends and relatives of those judges accused of taking bribes rally round them and declare they were just the scapegoats? If only we could find out the truth on this island. But then maybe we would never sleep.
Rightly though the Prime Minister wants to beef up the Commission against Corruption but I think the answer is rather to be found in our education system. We can’t eradicate corruption via a Commission only. We have to eradicate it slowly by educating ourselves out of this colonial backwater mentality, where now too many steal from the government instead of from the British. Our education system promotes blind acceptance through too much learning by rote. It promotes cynicism when we see rules changed to accommodate certain people. It promotes binge behaviour in Paceville because it has failed a whole generation and put them off learning, discussing, having ideas, just wanting to live instead of wanting to car crash your senses out of oblivion with all the drugs on mainstream offer.
And worst of all, an education system that promotes poverty of thought, which is endemic, whether you listen to people buying their veggies, whether you read newspapers, whether you listen to Parliament.
Education really is the great cause of our times. All our wrongs can only start to be sorted when we get it right. Some of the reforms are good. They need to go much, much further though.
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