One would be tempted to query Education Minister Evarist Bartolo's lament in Parliament last week that parents in Malta still look at culture and the arts as "a waste of time", particularly at a time of the year when important exams are approaching. How could that be true on an island so replete with pianists and established and emerging poets?

Here in Sliema, parents in a multitude of cars and a variety of brands double park, triple park and generally obstruct pavements and access to private garages while they wait for their artistic offspring to come out of a ballet school that seems to be doing remarkably well.

And are not our festas and our fireworks and our bands part of the culture that identifies us as a nation?

We would like to think so. The truth is that culture and the arts are not merely a matter of personal aggrandisement through which one is self-devoted to the embellishment of the family name. They are a lot more and they need to be an integral part of our day-to-day system which encourages participation for participation's sake rather than as the direct result of some form of false pretentions. Minister Bartolo knew what he was talking about, as was his Cabinet colleague Owen Bonnici during the discussion on the Arts Council Bill.

Bartolo had the right word for it - tragedy. When a nation takes culture and the arts as a hobby, one can elbow it out of his or her daily existence due to other pressing needs and ambitions; it only perpetrates the very concept of pretence, a game that we have sadly allowed to grow and flourish to the detriment of genuine self-fulfilment.

Don't get me wrong, for a small nation we have had and still have a fairly good number of real professionals in the cultural and artistic fields, from writers, poets and artists to singers, musicians and sportsmen. What many eager and well-meaning parents fail to appreciate is the fact that not everyone can be Oreste Kirkop, Francis Ebejer, Emvin Cremona, Joseph Calleja, Edward de Bono, Mary Spiteri, Carmine Lauri etc. However, everyone can find personal happiness and internal solace in the arts and in culture as long as they become part of a genuine, long-term process of intellectual and artistic enrichment.

Interrupting all that with a long hiatus for exams and the "excitement" of comparative results in the competitive environment of our educational set-up inevitably leads to a general abandonment of that same instinct one needs to truly nurture the spirit as much as one, and here we are top-of-the-list, pampers the body.

Evarist Bartolo hit the nail on the head when clamouring for a new mentality, away from straightjacket attitudes to culture and the arts and a move towards the realisation of a system that encourages students to get more into music, the theatre and other artistic forms in combination with their studies, rather than just a temporary sideline that can "threaten" a future career.

The opportunities don't lack. There are initiatives and projects in a good number of different cultural fields, from music and dance to carnival and design, and while the current focus rightly seems to hover over the wider prospect of Valletta 18, the long-term aim, hopefully, is the change of mentality so urgently required.

 

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So much for history

We often accuse our historians, with good reason, of misinterpreting the major events that have occurred in modern times, i.e. since the French Revolution. Charles Xuereb's keenly debated book "France in the Maltese Collective Memory: Perceptions, Perspectives, Identities after Bonaparte in British Malta" offers one perfect example, of many, of the manipulation that we have witnessed over the centuries.

One would have thought that in this day and age, with the free flow of global information and intellectual liberty, such unfair tampering with the truths of history would become rarer. Not in Oklahoma, US, though.

It has just been reported that conservative lawmakers there are looking to ban Advanced Placement (AP) US history courses in the state, arguing that it teaches students "what is bad about America". Can you imagine German lawmakers banning teachers and students from reading and learning about the Nazi era, for example, or the British refusing to teach about the woes of colonialism?

The Oklahoma Bill was introduced by Daniel Fisher, a Republican representative and a member of the Black Robe Regiment - a group that seeks to dismantle the "false wall of separation between church and state". In a hearing on the proposal, Fisher complained that the new history framework approved by the College Board in 2012 takes away the focus on America's principles in order to highlight negative aspects of US history. I thought history was the presentation of historical and documented facts and not some sort of jingoistic hotchpotch.

According to the same representative, the proposed framework trades an emphasis on America's founding principles of constitutional government in favour of robust analyses of gender and racial oppression and class ethnicity and the lives of marginalized people, where the emphasis on instruction is of America as "a nation of oppressors and exploiters". If passed, by the way, the legislation would eliminate all funding for history courses in Oklahoma, and probably cause a domino effect in Colorado, Georgia and Texas. It has already been passed by the state's education committee.

The Bill does not stop at banning AP history. It also mandates that normal history classes in Oklahoma incorporate a long list of primary documents into their lesson plans, including three speeches from President Ronald Reagan and the address given by President George W. Bush on 11 September, 2001. Additionally, the documents include the sermon known as "A Model of Christian Charity" by John Winthrop, the sermon known as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards and the "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech made by Patrick Henry in 1775.

Teachers in Oklahoma, sadly with no say whatsoever in the proceedings, have understandably reacted with fierce criticism to the Bill on a proposal described by naive conservative lawmakers as "dominated by leftist ideology".

So much for history.

 

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Farewell, Bob

I was saddened to read the other day of the death of a good old friend, veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, in a car crash in New York.

I first met 73-year-old Bob Simon, who covered major conflicts, survived captivity in Iraq and was a long-time member of the network's "Sixty Minutes" on-air team, way back in December of 1989 when he flew over from Israel to cover the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Malta.

He wanted a comment from me on the summit which I gave "loftily" from the top of an Mdina bastion, but before that we had had a light breakfast at our Birkirkara home (my wife had almost fainted on watching Bob and his NBC team trooping in for the bacon!). I will always remember, however, the bemused bread seller who later that very same morning entered Mdina with his cart and donkey and then watched Bob and his team devouring all the bread he had for sale.

"Is it any good?" Bob asked me as the divine smell of that cart-load of Maltese bread loaves hit the air of the noble city. Margaret's bacon had seemingly not been enough. "Sure," I replied, "it's considered the best in the world."

Bob Simon was an award-winning newsman whose career spanned five decades. He covered the Vietnam War and spent years doing foreign reporting for CBS News, particularly from the Middle East. At the start of the Gulf War in 1991, Simon was part of a CBS News team who spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons after being captured near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

One other lasting memory I have is of him smiling politely, albeit kindly, when I expressed a long-time wish to become a foreign correspondent, something I only managed to achieve superficially over the years.

As Jeff Fager, executive producer of "Sixty Minutes" said in a statement on Simon's passing: "It is such a tragedy made worse because we lost him in a car accident, a man who has escaped more difficult situations than almost any journalist in modern times. Bob was a reporter's reporter."

In my very small way, I can vouch for that.