A recent survey in the UK seemed to show that parents there want our kind of education system. Well, not exactly. They don’t know the true end result of our homegrown approach (which seems to put financial and institutional power interests above our children’s personal development,) so they should perhaps be careful what they wish for.
In a nutshell this is what they are saying they want.
They want more homework, they want more exams, they want their children to be challenged more so they want exams to be tougher, they want much more discipline and consequent punishment and a raft of measures that really show they don’t know the end result of such tough educational practices. Of course, these are parents whose children are educated in the UK’s state sector, an overwhelmingly huge majority with a tiny percentage educated privately unlike here where our MPs and ministers don’t even need to pretend they use the state sector they fund so generously.
In Malta anyone, including our politicians, who can afford to sends their kids to the best schools, and today some Church and some of our private schools fall into this category. And a growing percentage in the UK want to now educate their kids privately, something that was almost a badge of shame 20 years ago when the best schools were still the state schools. Mind you, it is a similar situation here in Malta, as you can see from the tough competition to get into some private schools and the massive over subscription for Church schools, that people, very ordinary people in most cases, are voting with their feet out of the state sector if they can.
This exodus from the state sector should be ringing massive alarm bells all round.
Perhaps the answer is in fact to privatise most of our state schools. That one massive education authority, whether here in Malta or say across London, can never achieve the kind of result a one off head can achieve in a private school. Head-teachers like Bernie Mizzi at Chiswick and St Martins, for example, who manage to combine good results with personal development and nurturing, schools which give our kids character and confidence, schools which give children that extra edge they so badly need.
And that extra edge comes from personality and creativity, which leaves our kids feeling happy and having a sense of self-worth (can our Church schools bear that in mind please?), which does not come from getting the good grades only.
Perhaps the British government could send a group of these parents to Malta, to some of our Church schools for example, and see if they really like and appreciate the results of this kind of approach, of an approach which is over-rigorous, not at all personal and focuses on academic skills when these are so non-essential to a successful life anyway.
Only last week I heard of a 10-year-old child from a Church school having to sit in for four lunchtime breaks because of one missed mathematics correction. Actually I have heard of countless such stories of excessive punishment, of punishment being unrelated to the ‘crime’ wh-ich really should be looked into. As should be looked into the fact that a large percentage of those who come out of institutes where they are cared for by our nuns and priests are illiterate. Why? How come? You would understand it coming from our most problematic families but should it be so after being in the care of nuns and priests for years you can’t even read and write?
I thought this was the point of these small family style group living arrangements. That these people, nuns and priests, gave the kids a form of family life. You know the way we help our kids at home, see what they haven’t understood and go through it with them. That’s what makes kids do well at school, parental interest and encouragement at home, and that is what I thought these nuns and priests were doing in the main. Obviously many are, but some are failing miserably. Perhaps, sadly, the Church can’t get rid of them because with the few vocations it has, there is no-one to replace them?
And I know this at first hand because in my other life chairing the Housing Authority we started, with full government moral and ideological support and financial backing from the EU, a programme so that 15 kids who come out of these institutes would be given training, work and eventually housing too. We totally had to go back to basics in every sense. It is simply a miracle more of them don’t end up in trouble.
And more. Is it really true that in some or is it in many cases the nuns and priests eat different food from that of the children? I’ve had this confirmed to me a few times, not just by kids who lived there but by adults who did some form of voluntary work to help these children and saw the different bowls of fruit, the bruised end of the box ones given to and eaten by the kids, and the plump best of the bunch consumed my members of our religious orders, would you believe?
I thought these places recreated family life. I remember while my dad worked at what was then Barclays or MidMed that various institutions funded one of these flats where nuns and a few kids lived. Is it true that not only they eat separately from the children but feed themselves different food? Is that where fund raising money goes to feed our local crop of very many overweight nuns and priests?
Of course I am not attacking all our clergy here. There are a few angels. But the Church that preaches to us every Sunday, that listens to people’s confessions, should also come down on the bullying greedy elements among them who put many children off the Church for life, and rightly so.
Although we all moan about everything here, almost all our complaints can be rooted back to huge inadequacies in our education system. The majority is not educated at all, not just in their results but in their whole approach to life. Our lack of community, our disregard for others, or lack of respect for nature, our rampant and greedy over development are all testimony to that.
Our only true god here is money. Little else is valued. Being a nice and honest person is almost a source of derision, I jut hope we give the right people, the Bernie Mizzis of Malta, the power to change our education system top down and bottom up.
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