Another cold Sunday morning. I have completely forgotten our normally mild and warmish Maltese winters. They seem to have flown out of the window with one of our gale force winds this year!
Hurriedly driving into Valletta to watch my daughter, and many other beautiful children perform in the Masquerade parents day drama presentations, you have the usual Maltese experiences. Your car hits some deeper than deep holes because the heavy rain has exposed our roads as being chronically ill, not just ailing badly. You survive some death-defying antics on our larger than life roundabouts, a Mini crawls in the outer lane as if he, or she or it is on a stroll, a warden tries to give you a ticket for parking perfectly legitimately somewhere, it’s heavy and grey and bursting to rain – yet again – and you think, “Why, even the weather isn’t working.”
And then, like so many parents before me and parents yet to come, you forget all the hassles, the unpaid bills, the house which is never warm despite the same high bills, (oh yes, and the bird flu in Catania!), and you settle down to watch the next generation do their best in singing, in dance and in drama.
You watch all these parents who have turned up at 8.30 on a Sunday morning no less, in some cases bleary-eyed, to watch their kids strut their stuff, sing their hearts out and perform to the best of their ability. And suddenly you forget the crappy weather, the lousy roads, the fact that so many of us just can’t cope with all the costs of modern life and you get into the minds, the hearts, the spirits of Malta’s future, a generation of kids who should have so much to look forward to if we just let them.
Watching what this drama company (and I’m sure the others too) achieves with the children who attend it, however, I couldn’t help but feel that these should be universal experiences for our kids. If we are really serious about curbing underage drinking, too much drug abuse and a generation whose idea of fun is just hanging around getting plastered, talking about each other (what else is there to talk about in Malta?), and where money is the be-all and end-all of their existence, we surely have to offer them a little more than the traditional Maltese schooling system.
And, whatever we are told, the only way to curb these excesses is to stop or lessen them happening in the first place. Policing won’t stop underage drinking. You simply have to persuade the kids not to want to even be interested in starting. Somehow, they have to be sufficiently stimulated by their lives, that they just do not go into excessive mode, whether it is with drink, with sex and with all the drugs to which they have such easy access.
Some schools, like I believe St Martin’s in Swatar, do major in drama and keep it as a vital part of the syllabus, and you see the benefit. These kids are articulate, they can speak in public, they can organise, they can – most importantly of all – work together in groups. And you know they also have fun doing it, something at which we just don’t work hard enough here.
The fun factor. The clean fun factor. The joy from little inexpensive things, the joy we can all have if we let ourselves enjoy life and each other. Because schooling and learning is often, when you think about it, quite a solitary experience. You have all this information. You have to absorb it and then regurgitate it.
You rarely use it again so you forget it. Then the next year you are given even more information to learn and repeat, and perhaps, if you have a good memory, every year you get slightly better at being able to absorb more information more quickly. But that’s about it. It’s not really fun. It’s not very interactive. It’s not very useful or practical.
Drama, on the other hand, develops our children’s personalities in wonderful ways. The very silent child who suddenly delivers his lines strongly and with hitherto hidden passion. The young boy who showed us all he is a disco king at heart. The many kids who were totally absorbed by what they were doing and were hardly self-conscious at all, considering their young age and inexperience. The girls who sang like the sweetest angles, and the rock chick they all seem to be able to be!
The weather might not be working this winter but those of our kids who are lucky enough to do drama aren’t noticing. They really are the lucky ones. They are being stimulated, they are really enjoying themselves and learning in the process too. Perhaps I’m a socialist at heart, but I couldn’t help wishing this was a universal experience for all Maltese and Gozitan children.