The Education Minister has launched a ‘national literacy strategy’ to try to get more of us reading and writing in English and Maltese. I wish him luck. So many attempts have been made over the years and they have all failed catastrophically. The evidence is all around us. There are thousands of young and not-so-young Maltese for whom English is now a completely foreign language – not a second language, or something in which they can get by, but absolutely foreign. They sound like me trying to speak Italian. I have lost count of the number of times I have been in shops and similar places where one assistant calls another and asks for help communicating with a non-Maltese person in English. Only last week I heard a policewoman, who was asked by a British man where he should go with the form he held in hand, say to him abruptly, “Wait, wait” while gesticulating as one might do when telling toddlers to settle down. “How very rude,” I thought, but then realised what the problem was when one of her fellow officers came along and she asked him, in Maltese, to please explain to this man what he should do because “you can speak English better than I can”. She couldn’t speak English at all; she said “wait” because it was her only word in those circumstances.

The problem has been blamed, variously, on lack of exposure to English, on the failure to read, on having no interest in books, magazines or newspapers, on primary-school children being taught how to spell and write with ‘A is for apple’, ‘B is for ball’ and so on, when they don’t speak English. They are taught how to read and write in a language they don’t speak, rather than in the language they do speak, and they develop a pathological hatred of both reading and writing because it confuses them. And if they are taught how to read and write, starting from scratch, only in Maltese, that too is going to present a problem because people who know only Maltese, as the Education Minister said yesterday (but we knew that already) are at a huge disadvantage.

That’s an understatement. They are not at a huge disadvantage so much as in an impossible situation. What can people do when their only language is Maltese? It’s like trying to run the race of life with no legs. There can be no tertiary education – not even proper schooling, actually – and no development of the intellect or the whole person. Who knows what talents and gifts the linguistically handicapped might have which go for life undiscovered because of these difficulties?

The Education Minister pointed out that concentrating on schools is nowhere near enough, that schools account for just 30 per cent of a child’s success in education. That’s true: nothing of what I know or knew back then as a child was learned at school – nothing useful or interesting that is, including reading and writing. All the knowledge I acquired as a child I did through voracious reading in a most peculiar array of subjects, and through my own natural curiosity. Yes, in secondary school I learned things like maths, physics and chemistry, but never in life did I again need to know what happens when you heat copper, what the speed of light is, and nor did these tedious subjects make for fascinating conversation at the supper table. The things we really need to know are otherwise, and they are more properly the things we want to know.

People who speak and write perfect English, who love to read and who acquire information by those means, have a major advantage in life and work. They all make for rapid growth of the intellect, for the amassing of information and, because these things tend to go together, for its critical analysis and assessment. It is, put simply and starkly, absolutely not fair that some children are deprived of these skills because of their home environment – yes, their home environment, not their school, and the education minister was right to remark on that. Yes, life is not fair in most ways, but if something can be done to reach out to those thousands of children, teenagers, and people in their 20s and 30s, who are languishing in a shallow pool of Maltese only, it should be done. But here’s the thing: they have to want to, and I get the impression that so many of them don’t, because where they come from, English remains the despised language of the coloniser, and all they want is just enough to get by on Facebook.

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