Ivan Camilleri, who we all remember as one of PBS's main anchormen, wrote a report recently on Malta's educational progress calling us bottom of the class, which in fact we apparently are according to all the targets the European Union has set. These targets refer in the main to literacy levels, the age at which kids leave school as well as getting more of our young ones to go for science subjects. There are other benchmarks but these are the main ones we non-bureaucrats, we parents find perhaps most relevant and supposedly achievable.
The fact that we are bottom of the class despite spending so much on education is indeed cause for concern.
New schools are being built, huge investment is the order of the day. So what has gone wrong? Why in other words do we have top buildings in the form of all the new schools which seem to anchor PBS political news items, but bottom performance in areas like literacy and the age our children leave school, more specifically that so few go on to higher education of some sort or another?
Again these figures which make us bottom of the class fit incongruously into those of a nation that has so many well-educated and intelligent people, a tiny nation that produces some of Europe's top doctors, a tiny nation where most of the first class graduates in IT from the University of London, recently anyway, originated from Malta. A nation where parents spend a fortune on private lessons. A nation where parents are obsessed about their children's exam results. A nation where we, quite disgustingly, stupidly and short-sightedly in my view, push our kids to start to read and write at three or four. A nation where one of the highest percentages in Europe pays, or has to pay because of our disappointing State schools, for private education. A nation where a disproportionate number of those who go on to University actually come from our motley combination of Church-run and private fee-paying schools, and not from the State sector where a fortune from our taxes goes.
The truth is that we have managed to produce a two-tier education system.
Those who can pay or manage to win the lottery for Church schools can go on and do well, at least well by the standards we set. Many of those in the State system do not. When they do manage to do well coming from State schools, it is as much due to the steely ambition and grim determination of some parents who push and push to get their kids to the required crazy standard of parrot learning that we require from our children.
Because let us all say it once loud and clear. Our Matsec system is significantly responsible for the low numbers going on to higher education. It is ridiculously onerous and forces schools to overburden children from a young age. It doesn't encourage any form of creativity and emotional intelligence. It is about repeating swathes of never to be used again information. Just think. How often in your home or working life have you had to learn and repeat information the way we are taught to do in our schools? How often do we have to write essays? How often do we have written exams? How often do we even write, as in use handwriting? We, at least those working in an office, all use computers today, so even the writing skills we focus on ad nauseum will soon be obsolete. When are we going to wake up and smell the coffee? Can’t we get all our illiterate kids able at least to learn to write on a computer?
The whole country is run like this and it’s about time it was stopped. We keep doing things that are wrong, wrong for our kids minds, wrong for our kids' sense of wellbeing, wrong for us as a nation too. Sometimes I wonder if this is because they just want us to be stupid repeating little morons, ready to accept everything and not question. Is this really what a fairly newly independent country needs? Morons who can repeat information they are told?
I had lecturers who came in and dictated notes. Can you believe it? And it still goes on today! You took these notes down studiously and repeated them for your exams. Those with great memories like me got As all the way. How incredibly useful and educational! It is such a rubbish way of educating people and even though it was easy for me to thrive in that system I do now realise years later, and having worked and lived abroad, just how limiting that kind of education system is, if you even can call it educational at all!
Even the Church, which is meant to look after our spiritual welfare, has taken on this role. So to get through Holy Communion, and I use the words get through intentionally, we need lessons every week, sometimes two or three times a week.
Come on! Show our children some love. Let them have some fun. Let them laugh and play. Let them relax at home after a day at school which includes religion lessons. Why do they have to be dragged out to the parishes too? Let our families relax. Stop all this stress the Church and State through our ridiculous schooling is putting on family life locally!
The Church moans justifiably about house loans, or the size of them while operating a home loans bank itself. The Church preaches to the State about family values and then drags our children out from their homes two or three times a week to prepare six-year-olds for Holy Communion, when these kids should just be home playing, being loved and relaxing. And the Church, like the State, concentrates on big buildings. There is always a new church being built, or a new parish centre like the massively incongruous one at San Pawl Tat Targa.
It’s people hearts and emotions you have to grab in education, even spiritual education. Force-feeding six-year-olds is not the way to do it. People love to have values, love to be good, love to do good if given the chance; so nurture and encourage that and stop this private lesson mentality even for our children doing Communion and Confirmation.
Everyone grumbles about it here but publicly nobody moves. We are all scared. Scared of the system singling us out. Scared to be different. Scared to grab the power which is rightfully ours as citizens and as parents. Malta will never really move ahead while we look at our education through buildings instead of through the hearts, minds and personalities we should be nurturing.
Let our little ones have fun! Let our older ones find their niche and find things that interest them. Our one size fits all information regurgitating education system is actually bottom of the EU. Will that be enough to shake, if not wake us up out of our self satisfied slumber? I hope so for our children's sake at least.
[email protected]