Launching the Independence celebrations, the Nationalist Party held a business breakfast last week with education as its main theme. Along with the environment and employment (the themes for two more business breakfasts in the coming week), education is one of the three main pillars of this government’s action all the way to 2015, and “excellence”.
Excellence is easier proclaimed than attained.
Most of the presentations seemed to focus more on what has been done and less on what remains to be done, which is a lot, a huge lot.
It is always very instructive to review what has been done and assess progress. Up to some years ago we were told, for instance, that IT in schools was the panacea for everything. IT came and did change some things, but we are far, far from utilising the benefits of IT in education. OK, there were concerns about the quality of the tools, which have been fixed we are told. But unless work ethics are changed, we are still scratching the surface. In other countries, for instance, children can submit their homework by e-mail, parents can check their child’s progress on a daily basis by accessing the classroom’s webpage, and children can get additional help in various subjects.
Then, leaving aside the much-hyped (though perhaps necessary, as in Mater Dei, but you never know) building of new schools, we were told that the institution of colleges was most essential. At the business breakfast we heard MUT’s John Bencini say that, three years down the line, the colleges experiment has been left without the necessary resources, and, as a result, is faltering.
Other issues are still outstanding: the gathering had another long debate (not really a debate since all were in agreement) about the bad effects of exams at age 11, and about streaming vs non-streaming, which is almost the same thing. We have been discussing this issue since the 1970s. The Labour government removed exams in a ham-fisted way, and they were re-introduced with a vengeance. All sectors represented at the business breakfast expressed agreement with the removal of streaming/exams but parents are deemed to be heavily against it (unless things are well explained to them), and perhaps also teachers due to the removal of the classification of classes.
Beyond this shibboleth, there are far more issues that were not even mentioned at the business breakfast.
It may come as astounding news to those who were not there, but in the whole (and hot) two hours and more, not a single mention was made about illiteracy. This government has widened the top end of education, at university and now also at MCAST levels, but if the 2015 targets are to be met, if SmartCity is to find enough human resources, the focus and attention must now shift to the primary and secondary levels with literacy as the main target. Surely there are enough benchmarks regarding literacy that can be established, measured and compared.
Another issue that was fleetingly mentioned in Mr Bencini’s remarks was ‘unacceptable behaviour’, which he said is on the increase. There is far more to that: teachers in many cases try to impose discipline, but they sometimes find their efforts undermined even by their own colleagues or by heads intent on the promotion ladder.
The only way forward to reach the 2015 excellence, this paper feels, is to stop the current craze on school- or institution-building and to turn schools back to institutions of learning.
In our view, the government has some clear choices to make: either it keeps on running the schools but then goes for micro-management and overhauls the whole promotions system, increases contact hours and days (where Malta has a negative record in Europe), establishes clear targets for literacy and stops, resolutely stops all those children, who even with help do not progress, from being promoted, as this only serves to demotivate their fellow-students.
Or, as in so many other areas of national life, it sees its role as being more of a regulator than an actor, and opens up the whole school system to parental choice. It may be argued that parents already have a choice, between paying schools (here including the Church schools as well) and the non-paying ones, but, as in the case of hospitals, that is no choice at all. Schools must be rendered more, not less, autonomous, and parents allowed to shop around for the school they want for their children. This runs counter to the top-down, born-here-educated-here concept of the colleges, so perhaps the college idea was introduced without much debate.
Then too, the country, not the government, not the unions, not the teachers, must debate and do something about what drives parents up the wall and what so sorely impedes children from enjoying their school years as they should (school should be fun, as Peppi Azzopardi well said). This includes the whole issue of duttrina (lately extended by one or two years, with little to no consultation with parents), as well as the many non-academic activities of children, from ballet to football, and, oh of course, private lessons.
To conclude: the validity of a school system cannot be gauged from the top end – those who make it to university, MCAST and tertiary education – but from the lower level, starting with literacy, a healthy positive outlook on life, and eliminating the feeling of already being a failure at 11. Just like focusing on primary health care should be emphasised now, so too should the main focus on primary education be emphasised. Beyond the self-praise, there was alarmingly little of that last week.