If work is an essential element of human dignity, than we need to make a bigger effort to ensure that people seeking a job do find suitable employment. According to Employment and Training Corporation research conducted among 7,000 youths aged 16-24, who modern sociologists term as NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), 50 per cent “believe they will never find a job”.
Many of these jobless young people blame “luck, fate and misfortune” for their sad plight. Most of them do not really care about their future. So one must ask: is joblessness an inevitable fatality that afflicts some young people?
To answer the question one needs to first understand why so many young people find themselves in such a situation. The education authorities try to shift the blame on parents who not always appreciate the value of education in their children’s early years of life. Some students often blame the educational system that, according to them, fails to motivate them to learn enough to make themselves employable. Educators complain that in every educational reform they are not engaged well enough to contribute to a solution to this perennial problemof underachievement.
Shifting blame from one stakeholder to another will never do much to resolve this problem.
There is no doubt that the family environment is a determining factor in whether young students complete their education successfully.
Many argue that, in the past few generations, we have built a culture of dependence on the State to provide everyone with basic requirements for a decent lifestyle: free education, free medical services, subsidised housing and, possibly, even a well-paid risk-free job preferably with a government entity.
The modern economy that provides jobs relies on a very different mindset.
The political bickering as to who is to blame for our educational system short-changing so many thousands of young people in the last half century is at best useless. Malta spends more on education than the EU average and, yet, we rank very low in educational achievement.
Our political leaders need to move from just expressing concern about these alarming early school-leaving statistics and get to the root of the problem with a steely determination to resolve it.
The European Commission has, once again, insisted that the education authorities need to invest more in human resources. Put simply, they are telling us that we need to have the best-trained people who have a passion for education to instil the love of learning in our young people. Top-notch educators need to be paid top-notch salaries but they also need to be held accountable for achieving the ambitious objectives of the educational authorities.
Teaching needs to be a more respected profession just like the medical and legal professions. It should be made to attract the most motivated students who are interested in working hard to build a career. A teaching career should never be a soft option for university students who are more interested in the ‘perks’ teachers enjoy: long holidays and remuneration that is not performance related.
At the political level, our leaders need to stop living in denial. Paying students stipends and giving them freebies in the form of tablets may reap some educational benefits. However, what will make a difference is robust planning that puts students’ long-term interests at the centre of all action.
Joblessness needs not be an inevitable fatality for anyone.