There was no basement at St. Dorothy’s Tal-Virtu’ and students did not have access to the basement at the Mdina Convent.

For the nuns, gym was a waste of time. The only sort of P.E we ever got was having to walk all the way to Howard Gardens and play netball down in the ditch. And boy did we love that very brief breath of fresh air away form the mouldy classes. X’gym, gym, David , the nuns would have probably told us it’s a mortal sin.

No seriously, in my wife’s time there, late eighties – early nineties, gym was held in the basement – at Mdina.

There was just a little window opening at street level through which she showed it to me.

@ Cannot Resist Anymore! says:
I agree with you completely except on one count. They were forced to uproot their children by the Leader and PM KMB. He was nothing more than a puppet on a string. Leader di factum was Dom Mintoff. In fact his two nephews namely Wenzu Mintoff and sadly the late Laurence Mintoff were both uprooted from St. Aloysius College.

In the old days Labour when Is-salvatur ta’ Malta Duminku MIntoff was in power, parents who sent their children to church schools were ridiculed incessantly.

The numbskull Alex Saliba would not and could not have made it in these schools as he would have felt like a fish out of water.

I have one thing to add – thank you mum and dad for sending me to the Convent of the Sacred Heart and, later to St. Aloysius College.

Each class is different. You have good and crap teachers everywhere. You have good and crap students everywhere. You have large classrooms and smaller ones. You have great heads of schools and idiots. You have schools with excellent facilities and others which are lagging behind.

I was at St Edward’s and have only praise for the school except for the food they fed us. Again I don’t know better, however I was involved in the education sector for eight years and have seen the state sector making leaps and bounds.

Of course the state sector will always have the burden of those who come from families who do not care for their children’s education and I’m not referring to ‘poor’ people but those who don’t care and give no value to education.

The state system is slowly eliminating its shackles and that’s good news for everyone. I think the church schools suffered from the lottery system. It is true that the church should open its education to all and in particular to those from deprived backgrounds, but that has definitely resulted in loss of prestige and the church also lost recruiting ground.

Go to 05:58 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f49-tDSxSCM&feature=related