Carmelo Abela (TMID, 23 February) is correct to complain about the two consecutive editorials on education and their lack of balance. From an “independent” editor of a serious newspaper I would have expected to read some information about the Labour’s mess in education between 1971 and 1980 as well.

Mr Abela complains about school discipline and the serious cases of teacher/student conflicts after 1987. Does Mr Abela remember that in the early 1970s we had a Labour minister of education who used to call teachers names, and encouraged parents to call at schools for whatever action was thought necessary and confront school administrators? I had a headmaster who was so terrorized of the political environment that he used to side with students, even when they were wrong, thereby undermining the order and discipline in my class.

This was a time when permissiveness was becoming more pronounced. Order and discipline were so eroded that at the Secondary Technical School in Naxxar, for example, we began to face serious violent student gangs from different localities!

Maintenance of schools was a dirty word in the early 1970s. I believe that Dr Louis Galea’s eagerness to improve the school facilities is the result of his experience when teaching at STS Naxxar. We used to have classes without window panes or with broken panes for long periods of time. The plaster in the walls was deteriorating so much that students used to dig holes through the walls and throw rulers or peep through the walls from one classroom to another.

The filler between the floor tiles and the walls was also coming apart. On one occasion a mouse came out from one side of the classroom from beneath the tiles and crossed to the other side of the room. I was lucky that the students were concentrating on their examination papers and did not even notice what was happening. In the lower grounds of the school we had large rats as well.

Carnival

Ironically, when carnival time was drawing near there were no more restrictions on school supplies. We used to ration foolscaps and pens, but for the school carnival floats the country’s finances were truly sound under Labour!

For some reason, Mr Abela has also forgotten to mention the raising of the school leaving age from 14 to 16. Perhaps he did not wish to reveal a possible side effect of the reception class. There was nothing wrong in principle to raise the school leaving age. The problem was in the planning and the implementation of that policy. As a result of this measure, I taught Forms 3A and 3d (not 3D). We had 30 classes of Forms 3. We ran out of the whole alphabet and started again using small letters instead of capital letters!

In Form 3A, apart from English language, I used to teach English literature covering prose, poetry and drama, and including authors such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and others. In Form 3d, I had to teach John that his name was not spelt Jhon! We had a full set of books that should have been covered at the primary level.

In Form 4, I had a student who used to work as a conductor on weekends, and he used to claim that he earned more money in those two days than I earned for the whole week. I do not know if he were bluffing or if it were true. The problem then was that the majority of the 14 and 15 year old students had no motivation. With the schools and their books falling to pieces there was not much to attract them to the school.

Illiteracy

Some Labour shadow ministers complain about the level of illiteracy in Malta when compared to other European countries. They fail to tell us that previous Labour governments are partly responsible for such a rate, at least among those who were of school age when Labour education ministers were in power.

Today we speak about computers and state-of-the-art schools. In the 1970s the English Department at STS Naxxar did not even have a record player. The French and German Departments had one, but we could not use them because those were donated by the embassies concerned. When I complained in the course of a civics seminar, I was informed that we did not need such sophisticated equipment. So I had to borrow records of English literature from the British Council and take my personal record player to school from home!

To add insult to injury, in the mid-1970s, the Labour government implemented a re-organisation exercise killing the motivation of secondary schools teachers, particularly the graduate ones. A level playing field policy was implemented, and all teachers irrespective of their qualifications, experience and where they taught became Teachers 1 or 2. Secondary school holidays were reduced, primary school holidays were increased, and the graduate salary scale was abolished. The MUT was complicit in this exercise. That was the time when I decided to move from the teaching profession.

I am one of the few who were not against the worker-student scheme, and I was fortunate enough to benefit from it. But it was flawed in its planning and its implementation. There was practically no consultation either. Some of the lecturers who found themselves teaching at the New University had the same first degree as I had. Sometimes they forgot that they were not teaching at the 6th Form.

One lecturer penalised me because I wrote more in the civil law paper than the summaries that he had provided us. I had purchased the law notes from the law department at the university in Tal-Qroqq and studied them for my class on the other side of Msida valley!

I have no doubt that all Labour ministers had good intentions. Unfortunately, even hell is paved with good intentions. The education of our children deserves better. Labour should not be allowed to make another mess in education as it did in the past.