GUEST POST/The Nationalist Party must tackle the thorny subject of education

This guest post is by Matthew S.

First it made it clear that it is ready to take on the Gasan and Fenech business organisations if they break the rules. Then it pushed pro-environment motions in parliament. The next step will be including good environmental policies in its 2018 manifesto.

This is clearly a new Nationalist Party and it is heartening to see the Opposition pushing the right environmental policies. This puts it in lock-step with non-governmental organisations, Alternattiva Demokratika, civil society, the Maltese Curia and at least one (now former) Labour Member of Parliament.

Now the Nationalist Party must tackle the thorny subject of education. The past year has been an annus horribilis for education in Malta, with the International Global Competitive Index singling out education as one of the main issues holding back the country’s competitiveness. Then a report published in Malta showed that 25% of pupils quit the formal education system before finishing secondary school.

Another report revealed how poorly Maltese pupils do in history, and their complete bewilderment when faced with even the most basic questions in examinations. And overall, problems of this nature are exacerbated because of poor reading, comprehension and writing skills.

In the midst of the EU-Africa Migration Summit, which helped this far more important news to be buried, the European Commission released the Education and Training Monitor 2015, in which Malta was heavily criticised for its early school leaving rate, low-skilled workforce, educational bottlenecks and inability to meet modern labour market requirements. The punchline of all this was Jordanian construction company owner Hani Hasan Naji al Salah promising to ‘invest in education for The South’ with a “university” for fee-paying Middle Eastern and Far Eastern students.

Maltese education is not working. It has not been working for many years and now it is high time that something is done about it. Before the 2013 election, Joseph Muscat had promised young, unemployed people that he would get them all into work, education or training. He has failed.

We know that Muscat and his ministers treat the civil service as if it were an employment agency for their family and friends but there is a limit as to how many people can be put on the state payroll – even if it were right to do that, which it is not – and the most mediocre paper-pusher needs some basic literacy skills.

The prime minister thinks that all is hunky dory as long as the unemployment rate is low but the truth is that the unemployment rate is artificially low because many unemployed and unskilled young people are not even registering for work. An upcoming Employment and Training Corporation report will say that half of the unemployed youth who are not registered as being in school anymore have no prospects and believe that they will never find a job. They survive on government aid and good old family networks which help them to find odd jobs and scrounge a living.

This is a disaster in the making. You cannot have an ever increasing number of idle people largely depending on generosity and odd-job charity. At some point, the burden will be such that the government will not be able to help them anymore and they will either have to find a real job (unlikely) or they will fall way below the breadline. This is how problems with homelessness begin, and there would be far more problems of that nature in Malta already where people were not still able to doss down at the homes of other members of their family. This is no way to run a modern, knowledge-based economy.

An ever-growing army of paper-pushers and passport-sellers does not a knowledge-based economy make. And education is not about handing out tablet computers to pupils or distributing LGBTI books to schools. Education is about teaching relevant material, inspiring pupils to learn more and fostering healthy habits like reading, writing and doing simple arithmetic without using a calculator.

I find it appalling that Evarist Bartolo, the Education Minister, always seems so pleased with himself whenever he visits a school or releases a statement. But I am not surprised at all. His standards were set sometime in the 1980s, and, back then, Maltese education was incomparably worse than it is today, and that was on a good day when the schools were allowed to open. Now that Bartolo has a major crisis on his hands, instead of doing something about it, he goes around schools eating horse-meat, wine and biċċa trifle with headmasters before posting about it on Facebook. I find this quite unbelievable.

I am absolutely sick and tired of Joseph Muscat’s bread-and-circuses tactic. It has been almost three years of non-stop gaudy and glitzy events, with a special commission even set up for the purpose and Lou Bondi on a very generous salaried contract as official ringmaster. If it’s not a celebration of EU membership, it’s Prince William visiting Malta for the 50th anniversary of Independence. If it’s not Prince William, then it’s a commemoration of l-Assedju l-Kbir. If it’s not l-Assedju l-Kbir, it’s the EU-Africa MIgration Summit, and if it’s not that, then it’s half the country shutting down for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. We had a Junior Eurovision Song Contest (complete with a national medal) in 2013 and we are going to have another one next year.

Just stop. Where are the bread and butter issues? Where are the policies which are truly going to improve people’s standard of living and propel society forward? I see absolutely no forward thinking in this administration. Like a 17-year-old on ecstasy, it merely lives for the moment, and tomorrow be damned.

One of the Nationalist Party’s rallying cries used to be ‘Biex ħadd ma jibqa’ lura’. Sadly, many young people have indeed been left behind and we need to start doing something about it. Evarist Bartolo is clearly a long-past-his-sell-by-date no-hoper, so the onus is on the Nationalist Party and the current shadow minister for education, Therese Comodini Cachia, to tackle this issue head on.