No statistics on illiterate school-leavers

Or… if the statistics are revealed they will embarrass Mrs Cristina??

@Mr C.Camilleri - I could be wrong re the figures, but then I'm just a normal citizen who pays taxes to fund the present and the future of this country, and not a minister who receives his or her pay from the taxes that I and others like me pay. I deduce from your comment that you are a PN supporter, just keep in mind that supporting a party should not mean defending also it’s incompetence no matter what.

@ Joanne Micallef You are calling others incompetent when you just do not know the figure of workers employed by KMB before the 1987 election. You quoted the figure of 500 when it was actually 8,000. This really shows Incompetence.

One word comes in mind after reading this bit of news INCOMPETENCE.

Perhaps it may interest Joe Public that our children, now in the 21st century, go through yearsand years of education without going once through a numeracy or literacy test. So much for colleges, re-organisation and bla bla bla.

Il-Ministru Cristina ghada kemm tghabbiet b’dal-piz. Izda li wara 20 sena bqajna bl-ghomja jmexxu l-ghomja, iebsa. Xi ghaxar snin ilu fil-gazzetta oht din, kont ktibt li mehtieg innaqqsu n-numru kbir ta’ msejkna illitterati u innummerati li ghandna MD

NB Please keep in mind that the statistics department couldn't even give us the number of those individuals who needed help with voting during the 2006 general election either. That is a statistics that could have been easily gathered and broken down by age bracket. Given the high turnout we would have had a good indication of the 18 -35 year olds who are functionally illiterate at least. If you need help with casting your vote because you can't read is a sign of functional illiteracy, you can't excercise your democratic right without someone else's facilitation !

Ms Christina goes for the feel good factor every time! Ignorance is bliss in this case. She obviously is very fond of equivocation. She can start by having a look at the UNESCO definition of illiteracy first:

'Literacy' is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in the wider society.

She can then also take a look at those students who have not achieved functional literacy, i.e. not having reading and writing skills that are inadequate to cope with the demands of everyday life. She can then take it a bit further and check for functional literacy in Mathematics and Science too.

I suspect this is why the Education division opted not to participate in the OECD's PISA Assessments 2003; 2006 and again in 2009 (see www.oecd.org Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Why can't we be sincere and face the facts. Why is the Minister for Education avoiding the truth?? Will it hurt that much ?

And even if that sentence is in Maltese it makes its reader or writer literate!? No wonder the literacy rate in Malta is over 90%! and little wonder that the majority of the Maltese are insular, poorly educated, bigoted, ignorant, bad-mannered, obese, have a peculiar gait, drive the way they do, over-react, arrogant and aggressive.

Wonderful. So once all the fancy talk about making Education a priority for this country fizzles away, we actually have no idea of how good (or bad) our public school system is!