My recent comments on how our educational system is failing our young people seem to have upset former Nationalist minister Michael Falzon. Rather than bring logical arguments to prove Eurostat statistics and me wrong, Michael resorted to the well-tested tactic of political relativism by urging his readers to believe how much worse off we were under the Labour administration between 1971 and 1987.
The aging Republican Guards of this senile and dysfunctional administration treat intelligent people like children. They remind them how very lucky they are that they have a Nationalist government, which, however badly it is performing, is much better than the Labour government of the 1970s and 1980s, which, according to them, was dominated by bogey men.
Facts speak for themselves. Eurostat statistics show that Malta occupies the bottom place in the league of EU countries that measures educational achievement by the number of young people who leave the educational system early. In 2006, 41.7 per cent of young people in Malta aged between 18 and 24 had left school early. Even more worrying is the fact that this figure shows deterioration when compared with the 2005 statistics.
How do we fare when compared to other EU countries? Well, the best performer is Slovenia, which joined the EU with us, and where only 5.2 per cent of young people leave the educational system early. In Cyprus, which perhaps is a better country to compare ourselves with, only 16 per cent of young people leave the educational system too early. All the countries that joined the EU with us, including former communist countries, fare much better than us in this league.
While the improvement in literacy in Malta is indeed welcome news, it is a very rudimentary and misleading indicator of educational achievement. Using old yardsticks to measure educational success in the first few years of the third millennium, as Michael Falzon does, will only lead to complacency by condoning under achievement, perhaps to limit political damage to this administration.
The tragedy is that people like Michael Falzon and other Nationalist Party apologists, have lost touch with reality, and are only interested in defending the status quo. They probably no longer meet families as often as they should, whose children are unemployed and unemployable, even if they cannot be labelled illiterate. They do not experience the anguish of these people who, despite spending years in our educational system, come out with little or no evidence of academic achievement that is so necessary to make them employable.
People like Michael Falzon prefer to live in the past, and they want us all to do the same. It suits them well because they believe that scaring people by recalling the “bad old days” of the Labour administrations of the 1970s and 1980s can be more effective than trying to defend the indefensible record of this government in the field of education.
But people living in the early years of the third millennium cannot easily forget the shameful record of the Nationalist administrations that ruled the country for most of the past 20 years and in which Michael Falzon was, for a time, one of the protagonists.
Weren’t 20 years of governance by super-ministers, like Michael Falzon himself, enough to reverse the “incredibly dismal record on education of the successive 1971–1987 MLP administrations”? Look at the Eurostat statistics on early school leavers, which Michael ignores, and it seems that 20 years were indeed not enough.
The Labour Party did not waste its time in opposition, but scrutinised the message the electorate was sending. We have updated, and will continue to update, our policies to address the ever-changing circumstances of our society. We believe that our families and our young people deserve better than what they are getting from the present dysfunctional administration.
We will not measure our success in education by the amount of money we spend, including that on variation orders and the building of new schools. We will not even measure success by the number of people who can read a newspaper because they are literate.
But we will monitor whether our educational systems are giving our young people the skills that are so necessary to make them employable. We will create the right incentives for our young people to become proficient in problem solving, knowledge of science, mathematics, and information technology. We will also make sure that our educators have an important say in our future plans to ensure that every euro we spend on education gives us a return.
If people like Michael Falzon are more interested in analysing the past to make us forget the present, so be it. Our society will discard them as old and mouldy relics of an era which most of us have long left behind because the future is what matters to us all.
www.mangioncharles.com
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Dr Mangion is deputy leader of the Opposition.