The state of our education system rarely features in the list of issues that are debated publicly in our society. Opinion leaders either do not attach importance to the subject of simply do not understand what the real issues are. My fear is that this lack of depth in the analysis of our educational system is also to be found in the thinking of many of our political leaders and educators.

Links between our schools and the workplace are still too tenuous- John Cassar White

Prof. Joe Friggieri used very diplomatic language when he recently stated that “the Prime Minister always highlights the millions we are spending on education every day, the schools being opened, and so I ask myself if there is something that we need to revise in our educational system”. The European Commission in a recent report on Malta was more direct. It advised the government to undertake a study by 2012 to determine why Malta was consistently underperforming in the educational achievement league despite the fact that we were not exactly parsimonious in our spending.

Many important quotes about education contain a grain of truth that some of those managing our educational system today seem to be ignoring. Winston Churchill, who never had a university education, is reputed to have said that education is one of those things – such as virtue, family, or faith – much too important to be controlled by politicians. The US educator and Harvard graduate Francis Keppel believed that “education is too important to be left solely to educators”. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair coined the simple but incisive mantra “Education, education, education” to define his strategy for making education the key to social and economic reform in Britain.

The words of Prof. Serracino Inglott on the proposed changes in our national minimum curriculum are equally relevant to our current situation; we will be foolish to ignore them in our haste to implement such an important reform in our educational system. His incisive and well-articulated thoughts leave no room for soft interpretations: “Never in Malta did we have a situation where the central educational authority left no space for freedom, originality and innovation for our teachers as was done since the National Minimum Curriculum was introduced”.

The Malta Union of Teachers added a very practical and valuable dimension to this rare, refreshing and unusually candid public debate on our educational system. They rightly pointed out the importance of putting discipline once again as a core value in our educational system. A combination of neo-liberal thinking that seems to be prevalent amongst our education academics and a lethargic attitude to the management of some of our schools has meant that discipline is no longer valued as a tool to promote learning amongst our young people. In the UK the reinstatement of strict and sensible codes of discipline in schools is once again becoming a strategy for upgrading their educational system. We will do well to learn from such good examples.

The MUT has also pointed out other areas of concern in the proposed new curriculum. The one that particularly strikes me is that our system does not cater for high achievers. Our economic future largely depends on our ability to identify and promote high achievers who will hopefully apply their talents to lead the businesses we need to create jobs and wealth. This does not go against the trend of encouraging inclusion in our educational system. It is just a different, but equally important, priority that at present is being discarded – possibly because of a misguided belief held by some influential education academics that the promotion of excellence and high achievement in education is anti-democratic and unacceptable in today’s reality.

It will be wise for our educational leaders at both the academic and political levels to stop and think about the concerns expressed by those who are not directly involved in defining policy but have the education of our young people at heart. One of my own concerns, perhaps coming from the fact that I have worked for over 40 years in business, is that the links between our schools and the workplace are still too tenuous.

Our business leaders need to be protagonists in the debate on the future shape of our educational system. They should not be afraid of ruffling a few feathers of those policy makers who believe that they know it all when it comes to decide on how we should be preparing our young people for the real world of work.

jcassarwhite@yahoo.com

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