I blame the parents

What are we saying here – that children need to learn these things at school or they won’t learn them at all? What sort of parents do they have, exactly? Oh, wait a minute.

I trust the education authorities have worked out that if 16-year-olds are so poorly informed, then it’s a given that their parents are the same or worse. And that is the root cause of the problem. More worryingly still, it’s a self-perpetuating problem because ignorant parents make for ignorant children who in turn grow up to be ignorant parents with ignorant children and so on.

Improving the quality of education in schools is never going to be enough. This is not a problem confined to Malta. It’s a problem wherever there is extensive ignorance among adults. Unless you somehow get to the parents, you are not going to be able to educate the children properly.

It’s not a problem restricted to social class or economic group, either. Some of the most catastrophically ignorant people I know are from my own social background, whatever that is. And in their case, they really have no excuse because they have had all the advantages (except, probably, properly informed parents), which makes their crime of ignorance so much worse.

On the front page of the Times of Malta today: