If I had to pinpoint the three areas I find most depressing about the local scene I would pick our poor environment, our poor education system and our even poorer attitude towards each other.

But significantly, if we could get the education thing right the other two main problems, and so many others would start to ease. What I find most worrying is that, as in so many areas we do not even seem to accept we have a problem.

Nowhere is this more evident than election time, probably the worst time to propose policies and the best time to dissect them. So let’s start by simply declaring, in the politest way possible the manifestations of what is going very wrong with our State and paying education system.

First of all we spend an awful lot of Malta’s income on education and value for money is weak at best.

It actually costs more to educate children in the State sector (through taxes) than it costs apparently for a parent to pay certain private school fees. After social services, in general education gobbles up, like health, huge amounts of cash. And yet.

Problem number two. The State system that is funded by Maltese and Gozitan taxes is no longer the sector of choice for Malta’s established and newer middle classes. The private sector is booming in education as in much else. Indeed if more people could afford it even more would send their children to private schools

Don’t our politicians who also send their children almost exclusively to private schools think this is wrong? Weirdly, once they start sixth form or attend university the State sector is used, partly because there is not much choice, no private University, at least so far. If it was financially viable though, somebody would set it up, and many of the middle classes would opt for that too as more and more are sending their children abroad to be educated.

Thirdly, we do not understand education in its fullest sense. Children do well, many pass exams. But we start them too young reading and writing. And then from the age of seven onwards, whether they are in the unpopular State or expensive private system, they have to absorb all manner of information that is way beyond their capacity to truly digest, much less understand!

We train them to learn and repeat information, and we call this education. Parents in Malta do not send their children to private schools so they can relax. They send them to private schools because they believe they will have a better chance of passing exams!

Which leads me to problem number four. In Malta the main educational deficit is with uneducated parents not uneducated children. Uneducated parents who push their children too hard. Uneducated parents who want their children to attend endless private lessons, as well as pursue various extra curricular activities, from football to dancing, from drama to karate. And in almost every area the fun of it has gone, over competitiveness is all.

Uneducated parents who don’t understand they are part of the education system too, that they could take their children to an art gallery say on a Saturday, that they could talk to them and reason with them, not scream at them and so much more

But the fourth problem of uneducated parents leads me to problem number five, which so many of us have been screaming (in an educated way of course!) from the rooftops for years only to be ignored. The whole Matsec system is overburdened, unfair and not producing relaxed, confident and educated children. It is only for morons who can memorise. Certain subjects, Maltese, Italian, and Biology to name a few of the worst culprits have become ridiculous. This is what many educated people complain about at dinner parties, on the beach in summer, all the time.

When I write about this I always get the most e-mails in response. But people are scared to write in. Scared that their children will be victimised. So on it goes and it does not change. At election time we argue about peripheral details and these five basics of a poor State system that all our middle classes including our politicians are avoiding, a system based on repeating information, allowing parents to push their children and the resultant stress suffered by Maltese children is a non manifesto item.

I just wonder what will happen to the poor kids now, who are enduring the Matsec system, who are as I write spending their weekends trying to learn the vast amounts they have to regurgitate soon. What will happen when they grow up and become parents? Will they express their concerns to the politicians? Or will all rebellion, individuality and freethinking have been beaten out of them?

Perhaps, just perhaps, if we educated Maltese children as if we loved them, as if we wanted to nurture them, as if they were each precious receptacles they could make Malta a better place one day than it is now.

Only a more educated electorate can one day make Malta, its education and its environment, a better place for those enduring Matsec today.

I hope they, the children enduring Matsec today, and studying this Sunday, can forgive us the rubbish we are force-feeding them too young and too much, and rise to the challenge...

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