Over the past month or so I have been ferrying my son and daughter to and from their respective ‘A’ and ‘O’ levels examinations.

It was a time of great stress for them, as it was for the hundreds of other students who are at an important crossroads in their life: the move up from secondary to post-secondary education, and that from the latter to tertiary education. Many will try to continue moving up the education ladder; others will fall by the wayside, and will hopefully land on their feet.

This constant presence of education in my family life inevitably led to several thoughts about how things have changed since I went through the same trials about my knowledge and the education system in general.

For one thing, nowadays many students are dropped off outside the examination centre by their parents whereas, in my days as a student, we used to travel by bus. It shows how pampered today’s youngsters are. It also shows a high level of distrust in the public transport system, as parents prefer the extra fuel expense and the sometimes long traffic jams rather than have their children run the risk of not arriving in time for their exams.

I think that the level of pressure that our students face today is higher than the level we experienced when we were their age. Or else the kind of pressure they are facing is different from the pressure we faced. As students, our main worry was to find sponsors to fund our university studies and, added to this, whether we would actually make it to university. Qualifications were not enough, seeing that admission was restricted to just a few hundred. The choice we had was also limited to a handful of courses.

Today, the situation is completely different when it comes to choice and openings, but it is still not easy to get the required passes to enter university, given the difficulty of the exams. I’ve seen students arrive at the examination hall with trembling hands and leave the building in tears because they found it too hard in spite of their effort. What made the situation worse this year was that there seem to have been too many errors in the papers that were drawn up, causing further distress to the students. It is a shame that Matsec allows this to happen.

The good thing about these days is that if the university doors are not opened to these youngsters, there is MCAST and the Institute of Tourism Studies that offer other opportunities. They did not exist in my time.

But education is not just passing examinations or getting degrees. It is much more than that and, unfortunately, we are not excelling in this regard. The numbers keep on rising, and it is good to note that many more young and not so young people are furthering their formal studies. Yet this does not mean that our institutions are producing well-educated people.

I can see it in the way people write and talk, and their lack of general knowledge. It gives me the creeps to see young people aspiring to become journalists and yet not knowing the difference between “where” and “were” or don’t have a clue who our Finance Minister is. These are people with a degree in communications, which are the ones I come across the most in my profession.

I can then also see it, generally speaking, in the inability to form an opinion and defend it or to keep up a conversation that goes beyond whether it is raining or sunny. Some people simply repeat what they have heard others say without understanding the line of reasoning they are taking; just try to swing the topic in a different direction and they shut up because it’s unchartered territory for them and they get confused. Or, if they are pretentious, persist in a logic that is all wrong.

When people have studied, show certificates and proudly carry a string of letters after their name, one expects much more in terms of ideas, thoughts and argumentative skills. Sadly, these are missing in a great majority of people who brag about their educational credentials.

It is a huge failure in our education system, which is geared to dump loads of information to be learnt by heart just for passing exams without stimulating the mind to think and grow.

There is another kind of ignorance that is worrying – and this is prevalent in people in authority, whether they have degrees or not.

It is worrying because they are in positions of power. People who enjoy this privilege take decisions that affect the lives of others; or else they influence other people who look up at them as demi-gods and think they can do no wrong.

When such decisions are then insulting to history or to the intelligence of others, it is quite scary. To think that culture is just football and village feasts and have the audacity to say it is upsetting; to believe that it is correct to place the open air market in Valletta just next to the new Parliament building is equally perturbing; and to describe as positive a European Union decision to reopen an excessive deficit procedure against Malta is simply incomprehensible.

To then say there is no money to keep the eternal flame lit all day and night while appointments costing the taxpayer much more in five years than the flame would in a century is an insult to those who died for this country and whose memory is being trampled upon.