In the eight months since the Nationalist Party was re-elected, there has not been much to cheer about.

Last week, however, there was finally an announcement with which I could fully agree.

The proposed reform, which will see not only the removal of Junior Lyceum exams and streaming, but is also suggesting the end of Common Entrance exams, is the best news to come out of the Ministry for Education in many, many years.

I have never been able to wrap my head around the reason for putting 11-year-old children through the torture and stress of exams.

The concept of having Junior Lyceums in the first place was to allow children in State schools a chance to “shine”. In this way, the stigma, which has always been attached to attending a “skola tal-gvern”, (which implied your parents could not afford or could not be bothered to pay for education in a Church or independent school) was slightly removed. The Junior Lyceums would cater for the best and the brightest, and to prove it your child would have to sit for examinations in five different subjects.

Suddenly, it became the number one goal of working class parents from all over the island, to grit their teeth, bring out the metaphoric whip and make sure their child got into “il-Junior”.

Each year, households grind to a halt as everything becomes focused around this crucial rite of passage. Passing The Exams becomes the Holy Grail, the gold pot at the end of the rainbow, as it is drummed into the child that his/her entire future and possible happiness will depend on those five precious grades.

You can always tell when it’s exam season: the mothers end up on Valium, the kids have dark circles under their eyes and the pressure is on the teachers to ensure “their” class has a high success rate. Once the exams are over, the summer months are spent in collective suspense, waiting with bated breath for The Results. Everyone’s nerves are in tatters and the tension mounts in a mixture of dread and anticipation until The Envelope finally slides through the mailbox. (Although in recent years it has gone all hi-tech with the results sent by SMS). Then there are screams of hysteria or screams of joy depending on whether the child has passed or not. Some parents punish children for having failed by forbidding them to go swimming or conversely, they lavish them with expensive presents for having passed.

Similarly, the Common Entrance exams for those wishing to enter a Church school at secondary level are another tortuous process that can cause incredible strain on a family. In this case, students are granted access to their school of choice according to how well they do – with the highest rankings getting first preference.

As for those who don’t make it, they are all lumped together in what is called an Area Secondary. Here you have a mixture of those who are not good at school either because they are genuinely slow as a result of learning difficulties, or because they have limited intelligence, or simply because they come from families which couldn’t be bothered with exams due to various socio-economic factors.

Now, some will argue that this is a good system because it gives high-flying students the opportunity to excel in an environment where they are with others who are like-minded. Perhaps.

But in real terms, as child development goes what, exactly, have we gained from all of this?

Basically, the Maltese educational system is excellent at producing children who are whizzes at passing exams, but too many of them are stunted in other ways. There are too many who have no idea how to argue their point coherently, how to express themselves verbally and few of them have a genuine thirst for general knowledge. Everything is studied “for the exam”. Even at university they ask lecturers what specific parts of the course they need to study. They have been programmed to regurgitate what they have been taught... and anything more than that is superfluous.

Hamsters

Usually one joins the Rat Race when one starts working, but with these exams I feel we have already turned kids into hamsters who go round and round on their wheel in their cage, at a time when they should be enjoying their childhood instead. The temptation to keep up with the Joneses starts early and is especially rife in a small community such as ours. Never is it more apparent than at exam time. It’s the chance for parents (especially mothers) to gloat and swell with pride when making their purchases at the cheese counter, using that untranslatable phrase “tieghi ghaddhieli ghall-Junior!” Of course, the Mum is being honest here, her son truly did get into the Junior Lyceum “for” her, because I really doubt whether most children at that age are academically ambitious.

I suppose the ability to memorise reams of proverbs by heart may come in as a useful skill when taking part in a trivia quiz sometime in the distant future. But at the age of 11, with his/her head crammed with assorted bits of memorised “knowledge”, the child who has made Mama proud by securing a place in a coveted school knows that this is just the beginning. They will now be expected to live up to everyone’s expectations. From this day forward, no slacking allowed; preferably no playing either.

From now until they graduate at the age of 22, with their eyes glazed over by the sight of more exam papers than they wish to remember, there’s no turning back. I sometimes imagine children staring at their future with gloom with a bellowing voice echoing in their head, “You will continue sitting for exams, and you will pass with flying colours, even if it kills me, you and everyone else in the family in the process.”

Why are you so slow?

The segregation of students by ability or, as it is also known, streaming, is another concept which probably started out with good intentions but has simply left in its wake a large number of victims. Just like the kids who have not made it into a Junior Lyceum, the children in the “lower streams” as they are known, have been labelled with a big fat “F” for failure, which will stick to them for the rest of their lives. They know they have been left behind because they are not smart enough, but think about it. Why should intelligence simply be measured by academic subjects? Shouldn’t creativity, technical know-how or a gift for the performing arts or in sports be just as valued by our educational system?

Rather than finding out what a child is good at and encouraging that talent to flourish, our educational system is almost sadistic in demanding that everyone must be good in the core subjects.

As I watch thousands graduate over the next few weeks, I can’t help but think of those other thousands who have been tossed aside on a scrap heap. Despite compulsory free education, we have far too many 16-year-olds who leave school having learnt practically nothing. Some of them are illiterate, which is incredible and unacceptable in this day and age, and most of them are unemployable because they have no skills.

I repeat, no skills.

This I find particularly hard to swallow because I believe everyone is capable of doing something, and it is the duty of our schools and educators to tap into this “something” rather than shrug helplessly at this tragic waste of human beings.

Luck or the gene pool?

Not everyone is born with the same aptitude for learning; this is true.

I consider myself lucky because I actually enjoyed studying and reading, and my parents used to have to prise me away from my books. But this is just a fluke – I could have just as easily been born someone who is a slow learner, and who hates the very idea of school.

I don’t think it has to do with the environment one is born into either. You see it in the same families all the time – children who immediately love school and their siblings, who have to be dragged to school kicking and screaming. There are so many other factors at work, too, including the kind of attention one is given by teachers, or whether the child likes a teacher or not. We all have memories of our favourite teachers, as well as those whom we loathed, who in turn made us loathe the subject they taught.

Even the very atmosphere of the classroom can influence one’s ability to learn.

I have heard countless stories of people who were “failures” at school, because they found the classroom setting boring, stifling or simply not challenging enough, only to leave school and suddenly blossom when they walk into a field of work they love. These people often go back to school at a later age, and end up being brilliant in their studies. Go figure.

But for others who have slipped through the system, and have never truly found what they are good at, there is no such happy ending.

Having said all this, I can understand why the removal of streaming and 11+ exams is making some parents nervous. Those who are ambitious for their children to do well in life, see this as a step backwards because they envisage a scenario where the “couldn’t care less” kids will drag down those who are academically bright.

As has been pointed out however, this scenario already exists successfully in Gozo, which does not have enough of a large population for streaming. In Church schools for girls and all independent schools, children are promoted from one year to the next in “mixed ability” classes.

Personally, I think an intelligent child will do well no matter what kind of school he/she is sent to. Similarly, children who simply have no desire to learn will not learn no matter how many thousands of euros are invested in their education.

As for really gifted children, they should be moved up a grade, rather than slower kids being pushed even further back.

What is a child worth?

Dumping all the children who are below average into one group is definitely not going to make them pick up any quicker... in fact, I think that is the reason why children in an Area Secondary school end up becoming impossible to control. Branded as failures, they have already given up on themselves because society has told them they don’t have what it takes, so their only outlet is to act out their frustration through unruly behaviour.

More and more we hear of children who disrupt a classroom, intimidate their classmates, and are verbally or physically abusive towards their teachers. But that is precisely why we need to reach out to these “problem children”, rather than treat them as outcasts.

One of the best films about teaching that I’ve ever seen is Freedom Writers.

Based on a true story, it follows a teacher who goes in with wide-eyed, naïve optimism to teach a group of tough teenagers who come from the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles, only to find that traditional methods just don’t work with them.

It is when she stops talking and starts listening to the children that she realises she needs to find a new way of making learning fit in with their reality. After she asks them to read The Diary of Anna Frank, she gives them all journals to write their daily experiences. The teacher eventually takes their personal stories and publishes them as a book.

One of the most poignant scenes in the film is when she is told by the principal that these children are not allowed new books because they will only damage them, so they are only given the worst torn and tattered copies. When the teacher buys new books out of her own pocket and gives them out, that one gesture changes the whole mood in the classroom. The teenagers, for once in their lives, are shown that they are worth receiving something completely brand new, rather than something used that no one else wants.

In life, no matter the degree of our intelligence, we all have “worth” – but sometimes it takes a special teacher to recognise it and bring it forth.

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