Stephen Calleja’s article on education contains many inaccuracies that need correcting.
In Malta, we do not have short school hours. Like any other country, ours has a legal framework on education − the Education Act grants a degree of independence to schools that work out their own particular calendar, which has to cover a specific number of contact hours, and said calendar is forwarded to the Education Division for approval. This government department has a particular section dedicated to overseeing matters pertaining to Church and other private schools; any headmaster of these schools can tell you how exacting and demanding the officials of this section are. So, it is the number of contact hours that’s important – not the number of days.
Stephen Calleja chose to be rather picky when quoting the Hon. Mr Evarist Bartolo. What Mr Bartolo also said – and which was left out in Calleja’s article − was that if the number of school hours and the number of school days per year are increased, the government has to invest more in its educational budget – by that, I understand that the teachers involved will have to get a hefty salary increase.
Calleja believes that we have a ‘short school day’. That is of no consequence.
Calleja believes that we have a ‘short school year’. Utter nonsense. In comparison with other countries, it is not a short school year at all. It is a lie to state that teachers have three months off in summer; it is a lie to state that they have far too many holidays in between. Schools abroad stop for their mid-term holidays, twice a year, for almost three weeks. They take the same number of days’ vacation for Christmas and Easter. In Malta, these holidays are very short – maximum of two school days off in mid-term, about seven days for Christmas and much less than that for Easter.
There are no teachers’ ‘privileges’ in existence! Nothing is further from the truth. Had that been the case, no teacher would have quit his job. Had that been the case, no teacher would suffer from nervous breakdowns; had that been the case, we would have no shortage of teachers in the country.
What is omitted by Calleja, a self-appointed expert of this newspaper on the topic of education, is the fact that as time goes by, teachers and educators are being given infinitely more administrative chores to do in filling in students’ reports and other material – such chores did not exist up to a few years ago. Now, they do. And this is an added burden and responsibility that teachers have. Much of this work is barely seen or noticed, especially by those not familiar with the educational field.
Whatever the ‘report’ of The Malta Independent on Sunday – edited by the writer of this newspaper, clearly suffering from a chip on his shoulder − is about, and whatever statistics the report produces, what I am putting down here are FACTS.
You would be distorting the truth if you insist on giving statistics in days and not in contact hours. That is the main focus of this argument.
It is not a question of how many hours Maltese children ‘spend in school’ but what they actually DO and what they actually RECEIVE while at school – to write in that manner shows that you have little, or no, idea about what a school really is and what it stands for.
Then again, what the writer fails to mention is the number of students in a classroom, under the responsibility/teaching/guidance of the given teacher. Abroad, the student-teacher ratio is smaller than that in Malta.
It is not true that Maltese students ‘have six-hour days – and this includes break-time’. Usually, students have eight lessons of 40-minute duration. Psychologists will tell you that students will only assimilate learning for the first 15 to 18 minutes. Imagine said students learning in summer!
Calleja quotes Prof. Murphy when claiming that ‘the less contact hours, the less students will learn’. I beg to differ. A teacher’s job is not to spoon-feed the students under his care; hence, it is not his job to cover the whole syllabus but merely to ‘un-cover’ the syllabus – that means that a very, very good portion of the educational process of assimilation and learning has to be done by the student himself, at home. This does not necessarily mean homework as we know it. Those among us who are very familiar in the field of education will immediately notice that this is no assertion of mine. I am actually and willingly plagiarising from the writings of two very important founders of Christian education – (St) Jean Baptiste De La Salle (De La Salle Brothers) and especially (St) Ignatius of Loyola (Jesuits). Incidentally, this is the same thing that the good professor has to say about the kind of teaching that is delivered. So, Calleja more or less contradicts himself.
Calleja asks whether children would have the same results if they had to stay away from private lessons. The answer is: it depends. Many times, private lessons – I never gave any! – are used to make up for the student’s lack of discipline and self-regulation that keeps him from sitting down at his desk and studying.
There is also a tendency among a portion of students to misbehave in class and be disruptive, but then attend private lessons. Teachers know what I am talking about.
I doubt very much whether ‘the great majority of the students need extra tuition outside school hours’. This is an unfounded assertion.
Calleja seems to ignore the fact that many schools are involving their students in extra-curricular activities as well as sports, after school hours. Many students take advantage of this. Obviously, not all.
One cannot expect schools to cater for every item needed in a person’s life. Indeed, one strives to do that, by all means. But having said that, you cannot, and must not expect, a school to cover everything; similarly, you cannot expect a teacher to replace the absent parents; and again, you cannot expect the young person to live a good portion of his life in an institution when his place is in the bosom of his family, at home. After all, what are family values for?
Calleja, again, shows that he is a total stranger to what school-life is about: it is not true that ‘students sit behind their desks for long hours’ and it is equally untrue that ‘schools do not fit such activities (such as drama, art, etc.) into their curriculum … because there is no time for them’. Students move about during and in between lessons – lessons are no longer the static ones that we remember; the geographical environment within the school also plays a part: students move around from one class to another – from the Geography room to a language lab, or from the Media Room back to their base-class. Schools are no longer those dull, grey corridors that we had in our day.
Calleja appears to be contradicting himself: he bemoans the fact that ‘students sit behind their desks for long hours’ but at the same time he advocates longer hours for these students at school. What does he expect them to be doing at school? Dance away the time, perhaps?
Calleja once again refers to the kind of education offered to students today, claiming that when students finally leave school, they are incapable of forming their own opinion. Well, it really depends on what kind of students you have in front of you. In my experience, students always have an opinion and they are rarely stopped from using their grey cells by any teacher. So, no, it is not ‘hard to find a student with opinions’.
It is quite clear that the subject of education is not Stephen Calleja’s forte; therefore he is unable to write about it in a constructive manner. Furthermore, he appears to have a problem with teachers in general. To dismiss the holding of formal classes, in our schools, in summer, with our climate, as ‘a ridiculous argument’ shows that he never taught a class, that he doesn’t know what teaching is all about and thinks that educational institutions, as well as the government, have endless budgets to air-condition their classes and corridors and offices, as well as re-build their schools for this purpose. At the end of the day, students deserve to be free to enjoy the summer.
In order to write constructively on such a loaded subject as education, you need to be immersed in it – a teacher, at least.
Franco Farrugia
Editorial note: It is not clear whether Mr Farrugia is replying to the news story “We should seriously consider increasing the number of school days – Evarist Bartolo (TMIS, 3 July), written by Stephen Calleja, or the opinion piece written by Mr Calleja on the same subject a week later.
Mr Farrugia is entitled to an opinion, just like everyone else, but resorting to personal attacks against our journalist is condemnable. In the news story, Mr Calleja was quoting what Mr Bartolo, Nottingham University Professor Roger Murphy and the Education Ministry said, and therefore Mr Farrugia would have done better to reply to the contents of that story, rather than attack the writer.
In his opinion piece, Mr Calleja was basing his comments on the information given the week earlier, and other stories published last year on the number of holidays students (not teachers) enjoy in Malta.
The facts as published were not contested, neither by the Education Ministry, nor by the Malta Union of Teachers. They show that Malta has one of the shortest school years (170 days, with the US having 180 and aiming for 200, while Japan has 243). That other countries “compensate” for shorter summer holidays with longer mid-term or Christmas holidays, as Mr Farrugia said, is not true, as shown in an article published on 15 August 2010 – Maltese students enjoy the highest number of holidays, in total, across Europe.
Mr Farrugia’s own inaccuracies are that it was never said – not in the news story and neither in Mr Calleja’s opinion piece – that teachers have a three-month holiday in summer. Neither is it true that Mr Calleja is the editor of this newspaper. Isn’t 78 per cent of fourth and fifth formers who need private lessons a “great majority”? Or do percentages have a different value for Mr Farrugia?
His last comment is utterly baseless – saying that one needs to be immersed in a subject to be able to write about it means he is implying that journalists can only write about one thing… journalism.
Answering point by point would prove excessively tedious, especially seeing that Mr Farrugia does not seem to accept reality when it comes to the teaching profession. And we would prefer not getting personal like he did, and mention teachers who use their time at school to regularly comment on online blogs – and then claim that they have so much to do.