Maltese children ranked lowest in Europe by Child Poverty Action Group
If we were Maltese we would be at duttrina
Malta’s children have been ranked lowest in Europe in terms of well-being in a study conducted by York University researchers for the Child Poverty Action Group. Material poverty (lack of money, resources) is just one of seven categories on which the conclusion was based. The others are health, subjective well-being (including being pressured by schoolwork), relationships (including family relationships), behaviour and risk, education, housing and environment.
I trust the print and television newsrooms will now pick this up and ask a few questions.
Children in Malta are actually materially very comfortably off in relative terms. They have more than enough to eat, access to good, free education, live in homes that are very spacious compared to the average continental house or flat, and have most of what they need – except for those at the very bottom of the ladder.
But we can’t escape the fact that children in Malta are not treated with respect. They are bullied, pushed around, pressured horribly by neurotic, stupid and blind parents who can’t see for the life of them that children only need do well at school in the fifth form and then only to pass their O-levels, and then again in the sixth form to pass their A-levels.
They are sent to Catholic doctrine classes – the equivalent of an Islamic madrassa in form and spirit – after a long, boring day at school, when they are exhausted and want to do nothing more than unwind in their bedroom with their toys. Then they are rushed back home and subjected to another hour at least of grinding pressure from fixated mothers who have turned motherhood into a career in which they must prove themselves (the wrong way).
Maltese children are subjected to the most relentless pressures and yet they are, on the whole, uneducated, lack general knowledge and an awareness of the world and current issues, cannot converse, and are introverted with adults and unsure of themselves in general.
This has to stop.
BBC News, Monday, 20 April
UK ranked low on youth wellbeing
A table of young people’s wellbeing in 29 European states – the EU plus Norway and Iceland – has ranked the UK 24th. The Netherlands was top while only Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta came lower than the UK.
The table, about youngsters aged up to 19, was compiled by York University researchers for the Child Poverty Action Group using mostly 2006 data. The government commented that its policies were lifting more than a million children out of poverty.
The researchers assessed the countries on 43 separate measures, ranging from infant mortality and obesity to material resources – like poverty and housing.
Also included were how children felt about their lives, schools and relationships.
CATEGORIES
health
subjective wellbeing
relationships
material resources
behaviour and risk
education
housing and environment
Feeling pressured by schoolwork, for example, fed into the measurement of “subjective wellbeing”. The study suggests little improvement since a similar report by Unicef two years ago, BBC correspondent James Westhead said.
The Netherlands led overall and was also in the upper third of the table in each area. Scandinavian countries dominated.
The UK’s rank of 24th was well below the position which might be expected given its affluence, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) report said.
Britain’s best score, 15th, was in children’s relationships – including how easy they say they find it to talk to their parents and get on with their classmates. On material resources, the UK was 24th out of the 26 countries for which data was available.
“The UK position is particularly influenced by the high number of children living in families where no parent works. Only Lithuania and Poland do worse,” said the report.
CPAG is not arguing against government policy focusing on income growth for the poorest families and the impact of public services. But it says the current recession means many families are threatened with rapid income falls. “There is nothing inevitable about the UK doing badly on child wellbeing,” it says. “The challenge should be to reverse this situation and put children front and centre of policy making.”
Looking beyond 2010, the charity has a series of recommendations:
* Protect jobs, remove barriers to work such as unsuitable and expensive childcare.
* Mend the “safety net” which it says leaves many families struggling well below the official poverty line.
* Drop means tests in favour of universal benefits such as child benefit.
* Stop in-work poverty from low wages.
* End the “classroom divide” in which children growing up in poverty have lower attainment.
* Provide fair public services for those who need them most.
* End “poverty premiums” which mean poor families pay more for basic goods, utilities and services and more of their income in taxes.
* Ensure a decent home for every family.
CPAG says that as most of the data in the report is from three years ago – which is not unusual in international comparisons – many recent government policy initiatives are not fully reflected. “The figures should therefore be read as a criticism of UK society, but not necessarily of recent social policy,” it stresses.
England’s children’s minister, Beverley Hughes, added that the fact that a government department had been created to focus on children, schools and families showed the increased importance being given to children. “Our Children’s Plan is our long term vision and it puts children and families at the centre of everything government does,” she said. “Our policies have lifted 600,000 children out of poverty and halved absolute poverty. Policies announced in the last two years will lift around a further 500,000 children out of poverty. We are very proud that the majority of our children are happy and do well but in those cases where children and their families face problems, we will continue to invest in high quality services which provide the vital help and support that they need.”
The CPAG report follows a BBC Newsround survey of 1,000 children around the UK.
Many were worried about money, bullying and knife crime – but most nevertheless said they were happy.
Overall ranking
1 Netherlands
2 Sweden
3 Norway
4 Iceland
5 Finland
6 Denmark
7 Slovenia
8 Germany
9 Ireland
10 Luxembourg
11 Austria
12 Cyprus
13 Spain
14 Belgium
15 France
16 Czech Republic
17 Slovakia
18 Estonia
19 Italy
20 Poland
21 Portugal
22 Hungary
23 Greece
24 United Kingdom
25 Romania
26 Bulgaria
27 Latvia
28 Lithuania
29 Malta
Source: Child Poverty Action Group
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I cant say how much I agree with you. If I could avoid sending my children to Muzew I would, but there is no escaping that if I want them to go for Holy Communion. Believe me I have tried all avenues, but there are none. In my day, I never attended a single Muzew class, thanks to my mother’s poor view of the whole organisation. I was tutored by an enlightened family friend, a priest, who was far ahead of his time. He’s dead now.
[Daphne – I never went to tal-Muzew and I was never tutored either. In my day, it was kind of a village thing. You can just opt out of the ‘Holy Communion’ circus. Think about it: you and your children are paying a really high price in exchange for the right to walk up the aisle wearing a white dress one day in June aged six. What is the point, exactly?]
This time round, this will not be accepted by the church.
As for chivvying and bullying, our children have no time to enjoy their childhood. I’m determined that this will not happen with my children.
Good for you, Mario.
Mandy – Mario, if you insist on sending your son to duttrina, there’s a place not far from your home where classes are held once a week in English. Refreshingly, they are also extremely relaxed about attendance (or extreme lack of in certain cases), which is a relief after the rigid “old-fashionedness” and feeling of “malawgurju” that was ever-present in some classes at what I believe is your current parish.
(Jekk tibghat sms lir-ragel, jghidlek ghal fejn qed nirreferi.)
Mandy – Is this St Gregory’s by any chance?
The report from their website:
http://www.cpag.org.uk/info/ChildWellbeingandChildPoverty.pdf
Well, I’m surprised, to be honest. I wouldn’t have thought Malta was that bad.
It is worth noting that the Netherlands is probably Europe’s most liberal country, with marijuana, divorce and abortion legally and freely available and prostitutes in the shop windows, all of which should ruin a society, we are led to believe. Ho hum…
Just to add, Tim, that you’ve forgotten one very important legal right available in the Netherlands – the right to euthanasia.
I’m from Finland and most people think they know Holland but really never read a paper or have visited the Netherlands like I did.
As a matter of fact they have the lowest murder rate in Europe, the lowest drug deaths, the lowest teen pregnancies, the best school results, the lowest road deaths. fewer poor people then any other country, the best health care. Well I can go on, but just read the statistics of the OECD, UNO, WHO, EU, UNICEF, et cetera etc.
Yes, soft drugs are legalised but that doesn’t mean that they use them. As a matter of fact in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Spain, etc. drug-use is much higher. And talking about abortion, they have again the lowest figures even compared with countries where it’s forbidden.
This is because the Dutch have real morality and ethics. Just to compare, even the safest state in America – New Hampshire -has a higner murder rate.
And the Netherlands helps out people in war-zones and in poor regions.
First you have to know before you talk.
“Malta provided data for only four domains and this could have had a bearing on its general low ranking.”
“No data was provided for the material resources (that looked into poverty), education and housing, and environment domains.”
Source: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090422/local/malta-last-in-league
@ Scerri S
Yes, but if you look at Cyprus you will see that they only provided data for three domains and they still ranked 12th. The fact is that we ranked miserably in those domains for which we did actually provide data.
What counts is not how MANY domains are used but the relative importance of those particular domains to the specific country being analysed. In this case, the three domains used for Cyprus could have been the domains in which Cyprus faired best. The domains omitted for Malta, on the other hand, could have been the domains in which Malta faired best. Yet until such statistics are provided Malta’s ranking in such a study has no true academic standing.
Hi Daphne,
This is probably the best article/blog I have read in a long while. It surely should make us think. It definitely should make the bigwigs at Beltissebh consider their words when they babble about their ‘successes’ in education.
I will talk as a drama teacher in the public sector. Whenever I question 13-year-olds about their knowledge of playwrights, for example, very few go beyond Shakespeare, and then they don’t know what he wrote. Many consider Eileen Montesin as a great playwright!
Ok. I’m talking about theatre again, but that is my subject. We should be using theatre to help children grow culturally and socially but our bigwigs are more intent on using drama lessons to give the primary school teacher a free lesson, or to have the children crawl like ants and walk like cats.
And that is just one subject. What about literature, music, art, etc? How many children know about Mozart or Van Gogh?
Still, this is only the educational aspect of the problem. There are obviously other issues, but is anyone in a position to say how children are helped in these issues?
I’m sorry, but your expectations are ridiculous.
I don’t expect anybody to know who John von Neumann, Alan Turing, John Babbage, Ada Lovelace ,Kurt Godel etc are unless they are computer scientists or mathematicians.
Just as you probably heard of Bill Gates, I’ve heard of Shakespeare, but I can’t really go beyond that just like you can’t really go beyond Bill Gates.
No child knows about Bach or Escher.
Some children do know about Mozart and Van Gogh.
Education isn’t the problem, people are the problem.
Most comments to this report in yesterday’s Times were the usual “how dare foreigners have an opinion about anything Maltese”. This comment by Yvonne Evans combined this attitude with a bit of racist chit chat for good measure.
Mrs. Yvonne Evans (1 day, 1 hour ago)
We were laughing backwards when i read that the Netherlands came top out of 29 countries, in the Netherlands they have about 70 different nationalities mostly immigrants, my children where the only white children in a class of 21 pupils, have these people doing the survey ever been in a tram or going to work in the morning in one of the trains? as someone already mentioned below i rest my case, cause we know better, Malta came bottom what ever are these people thinking off? please stay off the red bull its going to your empty heads sorry but this doesn’t wash with me and i see alot of other Maltese too who are proud of our country and the way we bring our children. Go back to sleep Yorky.
Kids from Malta have an enormous risk of dying in road accidents and because of a very high murder rate the highest in Europe. The facts are the facts.
[Daphne – The infant mortality rate and child mortality rate in Malta are actually among the lowest in the world. Sadly, this is not the case with child abuse.]
And kids from Malta are poor compared with other European kids.
And Maltese kids are fat, very fat indeed, as they get a very bad education. Just read the PISA school report. Maltese kids scoring 178 points less compared with kids from the Netherlands.
Yes it’s hard to read the truth but that’s the state of Malta doing almost nothing for their kids.
Knowing almost nothing about social sciences I can’t really judge this survey. It is rather hard to believe, however, that children in Romania are better off than those in Malta.
Of course they are better off, apparently all the Romanian teenage muggers went to Italy …
This is a very worrying report. I can’t agree with you more, Daphne. Re Muzew, today’s children only go twice a week. In my time – a long time ago – we went four days a week and had a cathecism session by the archpriest every Sunday at 2pm on top of it all.
However, today’s children have more to contend with in other extra-curricular activities – ballet lessons, singing lessons, guitar lessons etc., sometimes from the age of three, maybe attending more than one activity per week. I’ve heard of parents who send their children to two different teachers for private lessons to make sure they pass the Junior Lyceum exam. Some parents- especially mothers – are so obsessed with high results that they punish their children for getting a mark below 90. Would you believe it? The list is endless and I could go on forever. Today’s children may have more material things than we had but they hardly have any childhood. Poor indeed!
Great article. I had a childhood of continuous lessons and exams resulting in 12 O-levels (mostly A) and 4 A-levels (all A). By the time I made it to university I was exhausted of all that, and at a time when I should have been widening my horizons and putting more pressure on myself to work and research, I yearned to get it all over with instead. Looking back 20 years later, I am thankful for the history, literature, geography, some math and sciences I learned, but wonder why we had to cram in so much Maltese literature, religious studies (only from the Catholic perspective, of course), Italian past continuous verbs, Arabic (totally forgotten, apart from the words similar to Maltese), etc. and think how much that time could have been better spent doing other things. I did not need all those qualifications and a more wide approach to general knowledge and learning would have been much better.
[Daphne – You were cursed with too much diligence and an aptitude for study, both of which are completely unnecessary if you are reasonably intelligent, as you must be with those results, which are impossible to achieve through mere study. In my case, it wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t study as that I was psychologically incapable of it. My attention span for things that bored me was zero, and it remains so to this day. Nowadays, they would probably diagnose me with attention deficit disorder, but thank God there wasn’t any of that nonsense back then. I was a hopeless pupil, hated homework and never did any. I rarely paid attention in class, was often sent out to the corridor, day-dreamed relentlessly and hardly ever had a clue what was happening up front (I sat at the back). I was tolerated only because I never failed exams but actually did very well. My secret weapons were commonsense, clear handwriting, total calm, strong thinking skills, a short-term photographic memory (I could look at a page and retain a picture of it) and a good command of language. I was also goal-driven, not process driven (I still am), so if the objective was to get O-levels, then I saw no point in doing any work at school until the last few months of the fifth form, and then only the minimum required to target the grade I needed. I did a bit of studying on the eve of exams, for those subjects which involved facts and where language would be useless, like physics, but not much. The inescapable truth is this: if children are fairly intelligent, they don’t need to study or do homework, and if they aren’t intelligent, no amount of studying is going to make a blind bit of difference, though they should pay attention in class because otherwise they’re finished. For those who are intelligent, relentless work and studying will only get them an A instead of a B, and that doesn’t make a difference either in the scheme of things. Going by my own experience, I left my children alone, never insisted they study (rather the opposite) and campaigned against homework rather than for it. Like me, they left school with good grades in at least 11 subjects, giving further weight to my belief that studying at school is actually counterproductive because it seems to ‘block’ the mind. You have to study for A-levels – though not much – and you have to work hard at university, but school should be a playground for the mind, a time when it is opened up and not shut down.]
@ Tim Ripard. What a distorted view of the Netherlands. A couple of streets in the centre of Amsterdam are not a good representation of a country, and Dutch society is built of much, much more than that.
[Daphne – I agree with you there. To me, it is the ideal society, with the values and attitudes I cherish most and feel most comfortable with.]
Holland, I meant no offence. All I’m pointing out here is that the availability of these things (and I’m pretty sure that divorce, abortion and marijuana are available everywhere and not just in Amsterdam), contrary to the fundamentalist opinions frequently expressed in Malta, appears not to affect children’s well-being. It’s not a view of the Netherlands at all, just one facet and I never intended to put it across as my view of Dutch society. I don’t know Dutch society well enough to comment about it, but I regard its having the freedom to choose as being very positive.
Here in the U.S., “duttrina” is called Sunday school and takes place in church while the parents are at mass. That way adults can hear mass in peace without having to put up with young children who understandably have a hard time staying quiet for an hour or so. Sunday school is also (from what I hear) a lot more organised and fun than what I remember from my Maltese duttrina which was mind-numbingly boring and even rather morbid at times. I don’t mean to offend anyone but I always found “tal-muzew” to be rather creepy.
[Daphne – How come all you people my age went to duttrina? And how come I never had to and nobody mentioned it, and I never even knew it existed? None of my friends went.]
[Daphne – How come all you people my age went to duttrina? And how come I never had to and nobody mentioned it, and I never even knew it existed? None of my friends went.]
Daph, as far as I know, “tal-Muzew” has been around since Dun (San) Gorg, but was duttrina itself was never compulsory, the school religion lessons being deemed sufficient.
The fact that neither we, nor any of our friends ever went to duttrina is no doubt due to the fact that it (duttrina) only became compulsory around 30 years ago.
@Daphne
I have a similar story, always at the back daydreaming (or sometimes asleep and actually dreaming for real), continuously harassed and ridiculed by my teachers, and finally thrown out in form four for having no prospects. I took 16 O levels on my own at 15, passed all, mostly As and then pasted a copy of my results onto the headmasters office window in a final act of revenge. There is a lot to say for the power of revenge in motivating a teenager. Alas, though, their prophecy of my lack of prospects turned out true! But that’s another story.
“to have the children crawl like ants and walk like cats. ”
You said it. We were asked to act as if we were melting ice-cubes once. When I asked what the point (of this nonsense) was, I got the standard Adrian Buckle reply, so there you go.
How many children know about Mozart and van Gogh, I hear you say. You should be asking: How many children can see a real van Gogh or go to a Mozart performance on a 27 by 14 km rock? The truth is there’s bugger all you can do in such a minuscule country.
Children do not have to “see a real van Gogh or go to a Mozart performance” to be aware of the existence of the two (and others, naturally); they could simply learn about them (or at least about their existence) at school or at home.
The problem is that even if – from what I can see – children do go abroad with their families, it tends to be to places like EuroDisney, Club Med resorts, Dubai or somewhere to ski. Fine, but culture/history then never seem to come into the picture. Adults generally – wrongly – assume that children would not be interested in their surroundings or in history.
If all that children are “fed” at a young age is studying “for tests” (instead of a test being what it should be, ie a test to see what they have understood, rather than what they have learnt in a parrot-like way “for the test”), followed by endless rounds of pointless duttrina, ballet (unless the child particularly enjoys it, which is often not the case – “but I’ve already bought the year’s costumes / paid the fees, so she must continue to go till the year is up”), drama (ditto) and so on, after which they are then probably glued to their PSPs or Wiis, then there is not much room for them to really widen their knowledge of the world around them.
Lead researcher Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, of the University of York’s Social Policy Research Unit, is quoted as saying:
“The data mostly comes from 2006 and provides a snapshot, rather than a trend. This three year time difference means that some Government policy initiatives may not yet fully show in the data (either because investment was not in place or because policies may take a while to become apparent in the data).
http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2009/child-wellbeing/
http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/staff.html
Chuckled at the photo caption. Thanks.
As is usual in such league tables, the real issue is the yardstick that is used. How many points were given for what?
Apart from the fact that this exercise is based on data that is already 3 years old, whoever was ‘replying’ for Malta did not give any reply on three categories: material resources; education; and housing and environment. With data in these areas completely missing in the case of Malta, what can one expect? Comparisons are odious, but this is ridiculous.
As you can read in the PS. Malta is part of the EU and so must compile the statistics even if it doesn’t want to do so. So they used EU statistics *(and not the UNICEF) and those of the WHO and OECD. It’s what we call extrapolation in statistics.
Malta is getting a lot of EU money to reach the same European standards. For housing Malta has used the UNICEF figures again and for education the OECD-statistics and not the PISA 2006 report. Of course, the Maltese goverment has to set up a better statistics bureau.
@Holland
I agree with you that today children are overloaded too much study and homework. However, it is no excuse to remove certain subjects. Languages are important, so is history and science. But yes, I think most students today are rote learners. I see this in my colleagues at university. A while ago I told a friend of mine to read a good book which could interest him in his field of studies. He told me “Imma dak m’ghandniex ghall-ezami”. So you see, you’ve got a student culture that studies and learns not because it is really interested in the subjects, but because it is forced to.
@Daphne comment
“You were cursed with too much diligence and an aptitude for study, both of which are completely unnecessary if you are reasonably intelligent, as you must be with those results, which are impossible to achieve through mere study.”
It is possible Daphne. I know many people who study by heart and get straight A’s. Of course you ask them a thing about a thing which they haven’t studied and they’ll go blank. I’ve given up on studying too hard or taking exams so seriously. In the end, a common Gahan who studies by heart will get the same grade as me. So what, I got a B for studying a week before the exam and he got an A for studying for a whole year.
“In my case, it wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t study as that I was psychologically incapable of it. My attention span for things that bored me was zero, and it remains so to this day.”
Same as me, but I could focus very much on subjects which interested me, like history, technology and science. I never had much interest in the arts or languages though.
“The inescapable truth is this: if children are fairly intelligent, they don’t need to study or do homework, and if they aren’t intelligent, no amount of studying is going to make a blind bit of difference, though they should pay attention in class because otherwise they’re finished.”
I don’t agree. You need to stimulate the mind. And you don’t stimulate it only with play. Presenting a boy or girl with new knowledge and ideas which most of them are found in books important for the development of the mind. No reading, no stimulation.
[Daphne – That’s what I mean about play. Reading isn’t studying.]
“You have to study for A-levels – though not much – ”
For an A-level in religion perhaps? Not for an A-level in Physics, Mathematics or Chemistry. They’re bloody grueling exams even for the most bright students.
[Daphne – Yes, but then why on earth would you bother taking those A-levels unless they are specifically required for your chosen university course? It’s so important to always take the easy way out. Why bother getting As at O-level if Cs are going to get you into 6th form? Why bother getting As at A-level if you need Cs for university entrance? There’s just no point. The only thing you need is an upper second or first class degree and screw O-levels and A-levels.]
“It’s so important to always take the easy way out. Why bother getting As at O-level if Cs are going to get you into 6th form? Why bother getting As at A-level if you need Cs for university entrance? There’s just no point. The only thing you need is an upper second or first class degree and screw O-levels and A-levels”
At the end of the day it the degree and work experience that count the most. However, having good O-level and A-level results will look nicer on your CV. It is not a matter of taking an easy way out. If I can get an A, why not get it?
[Daphne – Because once you have A-levels, nobody looks at your O-level certificate, so the only O-levels you need are the five or six to get into sixth form and then university if you plan to carry on studying. And then if you decide to carry on studying, the only As and intermediates you need are the specific ones to get you into university, and you needn’t bother with an A if a C will do – because once you have a bachelor’s degree, you might as well throw your O and A level certificates away because nobody will look at them ever again. It’s called being pragmatic and not wasting time and effort on useless goals. Getting an A at A-level is a completely useless goal, unless you need it specifically for university entrance, and the only courses with that requirement, as I understand it, are medicine, dentistry and architecture and civil engineering.]
With regards to M.U.S.E.U.M. classes, I don’t know why there is so much animosity against this kind of activity.
[Daphne – The animosity is against the obligatory nature of the activity. There would be similar animosity towards scouts if children were forced to go there. Of course, it really isn’t obligatory at all, but parents seem to want their children to have access to the Holy Communion charade so that ‘they won’t be left out’. The reality is that a child can receive holy communion for the first time whenever and wherever the parents wish, without anyone’s permission. Permission is required for the white dress procession, but there is no policing otherwise.]
From what I remember when I used to go, we used to play football, play table tennis, go on hikes in the countryside, do bike hikes, organise water games in summer, go to the beach and organise barbecues.
[Daphne – I used to do all that, too, the difference being that my friends and I organised it for ourselves, or our parents did, without the involvement of third parties or the church. I can understand that children who don’t have proper parents would need il-Muzew to organise their fun for them, but most children do have proper parents and so tal-Muzew don’t need to organise their hikes and table tennis for them.]
It’s only a half an hour lesson each day. What’s the fuss.
[Daphne – Half an hour every day ruins every afternoon. Children come home from school, get changed, gobble down their meal, then their harassed mother must rush out again with her equally harassed children, drive to duttrina, and sit in the car for half an hour, before fighting her way back home through the traffic again. It is inconvenient, inconsiderate and shows scant respect for women and children, which is what we have come to expect from tal-Muzew.]
There is time for everything.
[Daphne – Only a man would say that. Meanwhile, my own view is that if men were expected to do the ferrying and rushing, there would be no doctrine classes, or they would be held only on Saturday mornings.]
And no, it was not brainwashing, as we were given time to ask questions and discuss. I don’t call that brainwashing.
[Daphne – Oh for crying out loud: you weren’t exactly asking questions of a disinterested party, were you? So you were never going to get an impartial, factual, realistic answer. “So didn’t Joseph ever have sex with Mary?” “So if he didn’t have sex with Mary, why wasn’t their marriage annulled?” “So if Jesus was the son of God, and not of Joseph, what sort of DNA would he have had?” I’d like to see any child try to ask those questions of a Muzew teacher. And nowadays, they know all about it.]
I’ve been at various job interviews and YES employers do look at A level and O levels. Some employees actually request even your school leaving certificate and O and A level certificates.
[Daphne – That would be because you don’t have a university degree or higher qualifications. Any interviewer who looks at the O-level results of a graduate is…..potty.]
Either you’re a practising Catholic or you’re not. If I were you I’d burn my baptism certificate at the next barbecue.
[Daphne – There is no such thing as a practising Catholic. You are either a Catholic (in which case you practise) or you are not. I am not. I don’t have a baptism certificate, so I can’t very well burn it. On the other hand, if I did have one, I would consider it an amusing thing to frame and hang up.]
It isn’t obligatory but as a PRACTISING Catholic it would be nice to encourage your kids to receive the holy communion with Jesus Christ. If you do not approve, don’t send your children to doctrine, but then don’t call yourself a Catholic.
[Daphne – I do not call myself a Catholic, because I do not think of myself as one. I do not think of myself as one because I am not one. I am not one because I do not believe in the fundamental tenets of the Catholic faith – the fundamental tenets, that is, which distinguish Catholicism from other forms of Christianity – and so, as a straightforward person, I cannot pretend otherwise. Nor would I have taught my children – or put up with them being taught – things in which I do not believe. My children are grown men. They’re not of an age to be sent to duttrina, and when they were, I didn’t send them. They would have hated it.]
I have proper parents, thank you very much, but they encouraged me to socialise with friends rather than going with them to the beach.
[Daphne – I socialised with the neighbourhood children, John, and we didn’t go to the beach with our parents. We grew up a few metres from one of the most popular beaches, and went there without adult supervision. Time spent without adult supervision is absolutely crucial for a child’s development. Present-day parents do not understand this, and children always have some adult or another breathing down their neck even when they are nine, 10, 11 and 12. It’s insane.]
So that’s why I used to go with my friends to MUSEUM. And no, when you’re younger than 16 you don’t go on wandering alone.
[Daphne – What? My god, no wonder there are so many frustrated perverts around if people are being kept under supervision until the age of 16. Child molesters molest children, not teenagers. Please don’t tell me that you believe people under the age of 16 shouldn’t be allowed out alone. I went out alone from the age of eight, usually with younger sisters and neighbouring kids in tow. At nine, I took the bus to Valletta and walked down to the School of Art. I went to the beach with friends at that age, too. It was normal. How can children develop self-reliance and initiative if they don’t get to go out alone until they are 16?]
Malta is crawling with child molesters, if you recall well. You need at least someone older to check if something bad has happened to you while out.
[Daphne – Get a grip. Child molestation takes place in precisely those places where children are supervised by adults – in the home, at school, at tal-Muzew, in church, and NOT in public places. Children are molested by adults who are familiar to them, and not by strangers in public places. In public places, what you get are perverts who get a thrill from exposing themselves. The reaction of well-adjusted children to that kind of thing is shrieks of horrified laughter, not scarring for life.]
I used to go to Muzew on foot or by bike. No need for ‘mummy’ to drive little Joey to everywhere he wants to go, like most kids request nowadays. The spoilt brats.
[Daphne – That’s probably because you’re from a village and lived right next to your duttrina class. And you’re contradicting yourself: I thought you said children should not be allowed out alone until they’re 16 and no longer children.]
“”So didn’t Joseph ever have sex with Mary?” “So if he didn’t have sex with Mary, why wasn’t their marriage annulled?” “So if Jesus was the son of God, and not of Joseph, what sort of DNA would he have had?”
Those are not questions but plain mockery. A religion doesn’t give scientific facts, but religious instruction on how to live a good Catholic life.
[Daphne – They are extremely valid questions that any intelligent child would put, or wish to put. They would not even occur to children who are not intelligent. If children are not asking these or similar questions, then it is a very bad sign: they were either born with a low to mediocre IQ or their thinking skills have not been developed or have actually been impaired. Questions are dismissed as mockery when they cannot be answered. It is counter-productive to expose intelligent children to duttrina for just this reason: conflicts are set up in their mind. Some parents deal with this by challenging or contradicting at home what their children are taught at duttrina. This is extremely damaging. Parents should never undermine the authority of their children’s teachers. If you don’t agree with what is being taught, then don’t send your children to be taught it. The questions children ask most frequently at duttrina/religion classes nowadays concern the relationship between Joseph and Mary. This is not because they are more intelligent nowadays but because many of them have direct or indirect experience of women being married to one man while having a child by somebody else. Perversely, their religion lessons are presenting it as acceptable. I find this quite hilarious.]
“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
Sigmund Freud
John, I don’t see what the fuss is all about regarding letting children go out on their own. It’s great for mental development and in this day and age, what is stopping the parents from sticking a transmitter inside the sole of their shoes (nowadays they are the size of a pin).
And its function isn’t really for child molestation, because public kidnappings aren’t that common especially in residential areas.
Re:”It is possible Daphne. I know many people who study by heart and get straight A’s.”
I studied mathematics and physics, so studying by heart was not an option. Daphne hit the nail on the head when she said I had too much diligence and an aptitude for study. I hope kids nowadays know a bit better; that it is important to do well at school but like everything else there is a balance, a balance that Maltese families have not mastered.
The state should worry about this. After all, our kids will run the country eventually. I agree that kids don’t learn most of their knowledge from school, but from the home. My 6-year-old son’s teacher describes him as a “child coming out of a book” and always has the answers to the questions she puts to the class and why? Only because at home he entertains himself very well. By yes, watching good television (definitely not the local ones), reading good books, lots of play and asking many questions with us parents answering as best we can instead of brushing him away.
Sadly, many parents think like Mrs Evans.These parents push their kids to the limit (for their own ego) unaware of the frustration these kids are being pushed to. Or worse, they don’t really care. So as soon as someone points something out to us, regarding our kids, oh no ” they should mind their own business and stop telling us what to do”.
To have 13-year-old kids in a drama class not going beyond Eileen Montesin is truly shocking.
To have 13-year-old kids in a drama class not going beyond Eileen Montesin is truly shocking.
It doesn’t say much about Buckle’s catchment area/group, does it?
National Geographic thinks Malta is an eastern European country.
Steven Fry thinks Gozo is the 2nd largest city in Malta.
(he said it on a Show called iQ)
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics
– Mark Twain
47.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
– Steven Wright
It doesn’t take much to understand why Malta is at the bottom of the list. There was no information in three fields.
@ Mario Debono: don’t not send your children to duttrina . It is actually your duty to teach your children what is wrong and what is right.
Muzew at Zurrieq is very different from your time when you were young. living in the outback of Zurrieq. Probably your mother was right in those days.
If you don’t send them to a place where they can meet and play with children their age, you would be createing another Holland who wrote his comment further up. From what I understood Holland never socialised with other children at Muzew or Scouts.
Instead of cursing darkness appreciate the little candlelight Muzew is giving your children. If not for religion send them there to socialise with other kids their age in a relaxed atmosphere.
[Daphne – Back to the same old argument, John. Children don’t need to go to duttrina to socialise. They spend the whole day with other children. They don’t need more children at 3.30pm when they get home. And if they do, it’s their special friends, to run around with, and not to sit in yet another classroom with children they don’t especially like, being hectored by yet another grown-up. You seem to have the mindset that all children’s relaxation should be watched over by grown-ups, who also organise it.
“It is actually your duty to teach your children what is wrong and what is right.” Exactly: and that is precisely why parents should not delegate the job to third parties with an agenda of their own. The difference between wrong and right should NEVER be taught within the context of religion. This is hugely dangerous and leads to the situation we have now: people who have ditched their views on religion and who have become amoral as a consequence of ditching ethical behaviour along with it. Wrong and right exist irrespective of religion and that is the context in which ethical behaviour must be taught.]
No, I was also lucky enough to have to go to Muzew or else I would have not been able to receive the first holy communion and, two years later, confirmation. I believe it was on a daily basis those days, but I think my subconcious is wrestling to block the details of that part of my life out, and cannot really remember the frequency.
As for creating “another Holland”, chance is a good thing.
just have a look at this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3665646.stm
It is taken from 2004, but I do not think things have changed so much in this country… I do feel something isn’t so clear in the ranking given above.
SJ – This article just makes one cry.
I was brought up in London. I never attended any ‘duttrina’ lessons and still received my first holy communion and my comfirmation two years later
Doesn’t someone at the curia realize that making religious lessons compulsory doesn’t equate to more religious children and subsequently more religious adults? I would guess that’s what they’re aiming for. I’d argue it does the exact opposite. I’m glad I live in France, and my daughter does not have to go through all of that, but to be honest, I wouldn’t send her if I lived in Malta. No one tells me how I should bring up and educate my child.
As to child well-being, I do see a difference between children in different countries. Here in France, children in general are very respectful to their elders, and are not as introverted as Maltese or British children. I’m not sure why. I think it’s perhaps more to do with adults’ reactions to children – on the whole, children are the centre of attention in France, whilst in Britain for example, they are background annoyances – than with the children themselves. Having said that, France comes out quite low on that list.
In Malta of the 1930s I attended Sunday school in the Wesleyan Chapel that is now the Bormla town hall. The religious content was minimal and I suspect that the general idea was to give the parents a break of a Sunday.
Sunday schools are long dead in the UK, but I am aware of the complex education system of Malta. I am of the opinion that schools are there to educate, not indoctrinate.
I taught for ten years at St Bernard’s Catholic School in Bethnal Green East London, and am now of the opinion that church schools are divisive and should be abolished.
Quote 1 : “They have more than enough to eat, access to *GOOD*, free education, …”
Quote 2: “They are sent to Catholic doctrine classes … after a long, boring day at school… Then they are rushed back home and subjected to another hour at least of grinding pressure from fixated mothers who have turned motherhood into a career in which they must prove themselves (the wrong way).”
Quote 3: “Maltese children are subjected to the most relentless pressures and yet they are, on the whole, uneducated, lack general knowledge…”
Isn’t quote 1 contradicting quote 2 and 3? I mean you are stating that we have good educational system, then you are saying that the children have “lack general knowledge”… If we have a good educational system, then our children MUST have a good general knowledge.
If we have a proper educational system, school day would NOT be long — just like Germany, Norway, the Netherlands…etc. If we have a good educational system, the Maltese children would have plenty of free time in the afternoon which can be used, for example, to go to the Musew.
I sincerely believe that our educational system is tad-dilettanti, a complete mess. E.g. afaik the government schools are still using the (extremely) old book named “Id-denfil”.
E.g.2 Year 6 students are still learning by heart practically all the subjects, including the useless religion, the complete boring Social Studies, Mathematics, English and Maltese. Imma kemm nifilhu inkunu boloh: how can they still EXAMINE religion?? Ofc religion can still be a subject thought in school BUT NOT examined. Marks, at that age, must NOT be 100% based on exams — ask the students to do project for the Social Studies, encourage the students to do some research… offer the subject in both Maltese and English…
Kemm nifihu inkunu pajjiz tad-dilettanti!