The definition of an educated person has changed over the years, and now it seems to mean “somebody with a university degree”, even if that person is completely ignorant of the arts or of the catalysts that changed history. The confusion is greater when a literal translation is made into Maltese: bniedem edukat is used to describe a polite, well-mannered person, rather than an educated one. Manners alone are not enough, though.

The education at most of our schools closes the mind rather than opens it, constraining children to the learning by rote of reams of facts and figures, for which they will have no use at all later in life. A proper education, on the other hand, is a broad church, which ensures that the adults into which these children will grow, will use what they have learnt, if only to make them better conversationalists whose mental horizons are not constricted.

Yet, the very subjects that make for an educated person are considered by our educationalists and certainly by most parents as an utter waste of time. Why give children an awareness of the great masters of art, when they could be studying more and more mathematics? Why help them to put the present into the context of history, when they could be learning the square root of heaven knows what? This is skewed reasoning.

Few adults have felt inadequate for not knowing (or having forgotten, as almost all of us have) their fractions, but very many have felt at some point the burden of their ignorance about art, history, and the great civilisations of the world. Knowledge of these is what makes an educated person.

One can know enough maths, but one can never know enough about the past and present of the world in which we live. When I look back at my own school days, I realise that my real education took place afterwards, or outside school hours, and that it would not have been possible had I not been a voracious reader driven by curiosity – this when the school at which I was a pupil was considered one of the better ones.

To get through the past 23 years since leaving school, I did not need all that mathematics, but no more than the basic arithmetic I learned in primary school. Because I use this skill rather than a calculator, I have never forgotten it. All the rest – the biology, the chemistry, the physics and the hours upon hours of tedious logarithms, have been flushed away into the deepest recesses of my mind, possibly never to return.

I did not start out hating science. My childhood reading was almost exclusively about scientific subjects – but I was made to hate it. The languages have turned out to be useful – not that I can carry on a conversation, but at least I know what is being said, and English literature classes taught me a certain amount. That is about all I have retained.

I did not even learn how to read and write proper English at school. I picked that up at home and through reading. My first formal grammar lesson took place during Latin classes at university. In my schooldays, grammar wasn’t taught as a subject apart, and from what I can gather, it still isn’t – which accounts for rather a great deal of the mess we read around us.

At school, I never learnt about art history and the history of civilisations. In those primitive days, the “clever” girls were guided into the science stream, whether they liked science or not, and the not-so-clever girls took the “stupid” subjects, namely art, geography and history. Now, I can hardly believe that this is how our educators thought – art, geography and history as time-fillers for the not-so-clever children and for those killing time until their 16th birthday?

It’s unbelievable. So many of my contemporaries grew up crippled by the lack of a proper education, though we didn’t see it that way at the time, and many of them still don’t see it today. When the conversation turns to something about which they know nothing, they just keep quiet or change the subject. Worse still, a lot of them feel excused from the need to know because they’re women and can get away with being uneducated.

* * *

Children coming out of schools today have had to study much harder than we did. I refused to do any homework if I could get away with it, and being goal-oriented rather than process-oriented even in those far-off days, I took the pragmatic approach of doing virtually nothing and then cramming everything into my short-term memory in the weeks running up to my O-levels.

I had figured out that what I needed was the certificate, rather than the long-term ability to draw a diagram of the reproductive organs of the dogfish, or to work out the angles on a variety of triangular shapes. This method was a raging success, and I will never forget the expression on the face of the teacher I had disliked most intensely, who had predicted that I would end up in the gutter because I refused to take an interest in her boring logarithms. It was when I had that certificate in my hand and could turn my back on school with no regrets that the real joy of finding out could begin.

When I look back now, I think of my schooling as a process that held me back from learning, rather than encouraging me to learn. I think that is what is still happening today. It is why so many Maltese pupils are bewildered, studying things “by heart” that they do not understand. It is why so many of our students are not properly educated at all, rendering them barely articulate and only able to manage information with difficulty. It is why we are churning out university graduates who are inflexible, who cannot even begin to think in terms of adapting to the job market, still less doing so.

The concept of a university degree as an education in itself, rather than as a rung up to a job or career in that particular discipline, is not yet with us. In the UK, young men and women with good degrees in history, philosophy, or art history go into banking or into other corporate careers, where the prime requisite is not so much a degree in finance as a good education that allows you to make conversation and to hold your own in situations where, if Monet or the Napoleonic Wars are mentioned during dinner with clients, a bewildered look does not pass over your face, revealing you to be a product of the backwoods.

In the more developed parts of Europe, it is not important what degree you have, so long as it is a good one. The most important thing is that you are educated and energetic, bright and able to solve problems quickly and smartly. A degree simply proves that you have staying-power and the discipline to read, research, write papers, and pass examinations.

* * *

Our unimaginative approach to university education is only getting worse. The law course is jammed with students who actually want to be practising lawyers, rather than seeing their law degree as good background for something else altogether. People are avoiding the arts “because there are no jobs in history/archaeology/history of art/philosophy/ancient Greek.” No, there aren’t any jobs actually in these disciplines, but it would be a revelation for people who think in this way to find out just how many high-flyers in the corporate world in London have precisely this kind of degree.

You don’t necessarily graduate in chemistry to become a chemist, or as an architect in the vain hope that there will be enough architectural business in tiny Malta to sustain you and 1,000 others in the field. We need to move away from thinking like this, and into thinking, along with the rest of the developed world, that schooling and university education are there to make us better, more flexible people with a wider range of options. A university degree should not be a life sentence to serve in that particular discipline – not at all.

The engineer Alexander Tranter, who has for several years worked as a corporation executive, raised a similar point in a recent newspaper article. He wrote that most people continue to think of engineers as experts in technical matters, there to solve mechanical or electrical problems, when the reality is that many of them are working in the fields of strategic management, innovation, and finance.

As he described it, “engineers, through their tough academic training, develop very strong problem-solving skills, built around a logical and systematic way of thinking. It is the development of this mental framework that makes engineers strong candidates (for careers in other fields).”

Mr Tranter quoted an article published in The Financial Times, written by the Dean of the School of Management at Boston University, Louis Lataif. Mr Lataif believes that the most effective chief executive officers today have been trained as scientists, and that they think differently from other managers. Mr Tranter himself wrote: “The next generation of engineers is embracing the philosophy that management teaching should fuse the arts, sciences and business.”

It is an approach with which I wholeheartedly agree – but it should not be restricted to engineers. We all need it.