The Talking Point of the Times of Malta of Thursday 28 April was penned by Therese Comodini Cachia. The title was Same segregated schooling. In her piece, Comodini Cachia criticized the current educational system and in a nutshell affirmed that the way this Government is behaving in education is leading to segregation because the talented students are being separated from those less talented in Government schools. I hold a totally different position on the current educational system. Unfortunately, not only pedagogy, but even history, tally with my arguments.
As someone who has made education my profession, I think that I am qualified to pass some remarks and also correct the wrong impression that the Nationalist Party may have of the present education system. The educational units mentioned by Comodini Cachia in her article as examples leading to educational segregation, such as CCP, learning zones and nurture clubs, were established by the Nationalist Administration. Definitely, they are not the work of the present government. Unfortunately, the Nationalist Government fell in love with Marxist educational philosophy and started ramming the comprehensive system down our throats. The system soon started to show serious cracks to the extent that in the eyes of many teachers, the NP ceased to appear as their natural party.
It should be pointed out that the comprehensive system was introduced in Malta for the first time by the then Minister of Education, Agatha Barbara. The system failed abysmally and it was the same Labour Government who changed direction completely and took up the French model of the lycée. The lyceums in fact were re-introduced by Philip Muscat and I still remember him, at a debate on television, stating that ‘min ma jibdilx jitqammel’, referring to the failed experiment introduced by Agatha Barbara. The reforms were further strengthened when KarmenuMifsudBonnici became Minister of Education. Many students coming from deprived and working class background benefited from this system.
My worry is that after 1987, the Government failed to place talented students who came from working class or deprived backgrounds in schools which would help them to flourish. I still remember my personal experience teaching at one such Lyceum in 1993-4, which by then, had become a mere area school; two particular teachers of Maths, who were sent to teach mathematics to the fifth formers, boasted in the staff room that they do not teach these classes because they do not know the syllabus. The result was that mathematics started to be taught to these fifth formers by a casual teacher, with an A Level in Maths. Today, this individual is one of the government's top directors.
Ironically, it was the Nationalists who started going back to Agatha Barbara’s comprehensive system to the detriment of many pupils who were attending government schools. The Nationalist Government started to insist that this was the best system because it reduced school segregation between talented and less talented pupils, declaring at the same timethat the educational reforms of the 70s failed because the minister was incompetent and the measures were introduced rashly. History is proving the Nationalists’ arguments wrong. The present measures were introduced over a number of years and still failed completely. There can be no doubt that the college system has failed miserably and that they are a sheer extension of area schools.
During the last five years of Nationalist administration, it was a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing in education. Teachers who opposed the comprehensive system were literally put aside and those who supported the system got one promotion after another. After 2013, many of these same individuals started to state publicly that the system is now not working.
By this I do not want to imply that what the Nationalists did in education was all wrong. There were many good initiatives, starting with university and continuing with MCAST. The same model that is working in the tertiary and upper secondary level should now be extended to our secondary schools. I think it is wrong to define its extension as segregation or constructing niches to cater for students failed by the system. On the contrary opening new niches in education can be the solution to our problems, as they will be offering a different type of education for different aptitudes of children. There are children who are gifted in academic subjects whilst others are gifted in vocational subjects. The State needs to give opportunities to one and all. Dragging them all in the same school equates to pedagogical madness.
What the Nationalists need to do is not to attack new initiatives such as ALP, but to push forward successful educational models, which the current Minister does not want to embrace, but which are beneficial to our educational system. This includes home schooling. Ironically, the winning educational model is the conservative one. What Malta needs are specialised schools and students do not go to school on the basis of where they live but according to their academic or vocational preference. While having good state schools appears normal in Europe, this is not the case in Malta. Those European countries, like Germany, who have good academic schooling are also the countries with good vocational schools. Holland and Austria, for example, are developing vocational colleges for secondary school students from ages 14 to 19, specialising in one area, like mechanics, hairdressing or electronics.
These are the models that the Nationalist Opposition should be promoting and not failed Marxist theories in education that have led Malta nowhere and are the reason why our country has ended up with a high level of early school leavers without a sound knowledge in any field.