Now that the first months of school are over, perhaps one can sum up the lot of talk about education for Cospicua children.
There is a "waste of ability". It has long been recognised but you need not go far back for information or statistics. Read the many letters to the editor. Read the reply to parliamentary questions. Read the report on the health and development of children presented by social workers. Though it is not written anywhere, it is evident that many children do not realise their educational potential.
This is not primarily a social question. Plenty of middle-class children do not go as far as they should. The idle and disinterested child does not get far whatever his home background.
Yet, experience shows that the proportion of working-class children who fail to reach their educational limit is greater than the proportion of middle-class children who fail to do so. So, secondarily it is a social problem: something in the family background makes this difference. The nature of this something has been the subject of much enquiry. These are merely a few of the factors concerned.
The working-class child tends to start school without a tradition of education behind him. His parents do not drive him to excel at his lessons. They probably do no teaching to reinforce his school work. The home probably lacks books. The child may well not be sent to bed in good time. He may be brought up in a trade union work-to-rule atmosphere, which leads him to adopt a go-slow attitude in school. Go on from there for yourself - it adds up to a wellknown picture.
What can we do to equalise the educational chances of middle-class and working-class children? To be certain we should have to take them all from their parents into these institutions at birth. This is politically inexpedient in a socialist state. So we must settle for second best; getting children into school at the earliest possible age.
We can agitate for earlier school entry but the decision is political and out of our hands. Late or early, there is no point in taking children into school unless they are recognised as being able to learn. The theory of fixed intelligence has been no help to the children of the working class. The nonsense about a reading readiness age has done much to waste ability in working-class children. Hard teaching - particularly of reading - needs to start the day a child enters school - be he age three or four years old. The year or two lost in making a start with reading is hard to make up for any child. A middle-class child with ample home help may make it up in a few years. A working-class child with no help but school may never make it up.
No child learns unless he is taught. It has been shown that middle-class children in small classes with the best teachers can teach themselves a lot providing the teacher does the rest. And the figures for the wastage of ability show that working-class children, in big classes with only average teachers, need to be taught.
Multiplying the number of university places will do nothing to stop the waste of ability. There is only one way to stop this waste. Catch them young. Start teaching them at once. Therefore, teach, teach and teach. The children of the poor do not pick it up for themselves.
Fr Mintoff is director of the Peace Lab, Ħal Far.