As I write, the Malta Union of Teachers (MUT) is in the middle of an unfriendly ball game with the Directorate for Educational Services and the Kunsill Malti għall-Isport (KMS).

To redo all sports grounds as football fields is to cheat schoolchildren of variety- Mark Anthony Falzon

The MUT is ‘concerned’that the directorate is signing contracts with KMS for thelease of school grounds after school hours. The union is also unhappy that these contractsare effectively transformingthese grounds into a football monoculture.

I had realised something was amiss. I live not too far away from the De La Salle school grounds. They include what until recently used to be a large dustbowl masquerading as a football field of sorts. The place is now a super-prim, turfed football pitch and running track. The spotlights are so powerful they can be seen from Valletta.

Probably not powerful enough to beat their rivals in Birkirkara, however. I had occasion some months ago to walk through my old school grounds at St Aloysius College. I hadn’t been to the place since I left school and didn’t expect to find it as I left it 20 years ago. Even so, what I did find was quite staggering.

The old St Aloysius school grounds were arranged over two sections. The first, that adjoining the school building itself, was really a bunch of open fields surfaced in a type of grit designed to rip slivers of skin right off your limbs if you happened to take even the gentlest of plunges. I reckon that earth soaked up more blood in an average month than Madrid’s Plaza de Toros.

The second and much larger area was what we called the ‘outer ground’ across the road from the schoolhouse. This included a full-sized football pitch and running track (again in St Bartholomew grit), a canteen, a bunch of rather neat tennis courts, and an assortment of rough, untamed patches of grass and shrubs, the biggest of which we called the ‘plateau’.

I don’t recall seeing any yaks or nomads’ huts so I suppose we must have been fairly optimistic geographers. The plateau was really just a leftover from the time the sporty bits were carved out. It was overgrown through most of the school year and by March or so all but the tallest of third formers could cross it quite undetected. Most importantly, it was far enough from the schoolhouse to put off prying Jesuits and their collaborationist henchmen (‘prefects’ these latter called themselves).

I vaguely remember the football pitches as sterile tracts where the Premier League wannabes shed their blood and premature testosterone. The rest was pure heaven. The ‘inner ground’ was where we spent our short breaks chasing about and playing all sorts of role-play games. It was also the scene of the legendary boċċi (as in marbles, not the Dear Dom kind) craze of the early 1980s.

The plateau was in a league of its own. It was home to caterpillars and the other small creatures that children seem so ideally-sized to observe. After the rains we would entertain ourselves no end by furrowing out canals to channel the runoff water. (I actually remember going to the library to take out a technical tome on canals.)

We also had a tree house in an almond tree at one point. This included a ‘safe’ where we kept, among other prized collective possessions, a condom someone had nicked off his parents’ medicine chest. You see, the tree house was the place for really, really bad things. It was also really, really good fun.

But that was then and the place has been redone well beyond the prophylactic. It has in fact been sterilised into an ordered legion of sports facilities, professional tracks, turfed pitches, and such. Surely a good thing?

I’m not so sure, for at least two reasons. The first has to do with what the MUT seems to be saying. I chanced across union president Kevin Bonello making a point on television last week that it was not quite right that football was being privileged.

In particular, it was strange that even the grounds in girls’ schools were being given over to the ball. Political correctness took two seconds to get the better of him and he added that girls played football too – but the message was out, and I agree with it.

I don’t care terribly much about the finer issues between the MUT, the KMS, and the directorate.But I can well share Bonello’sexasperation.

Football may be the most lucrative game of all but it is hardly universally beautiful.

The matter is simply that not all boys – and certainly not all girls – enjoy it. To redo all sports grounds as football fields is to cheat schoolchildren of variety.

That’s the easy bit. My second point – and this is where I imagine I part company with the MUT – concerns sport in general.

I find it quite unright that school grounds should be reclassified as ‘sports grounds’ and done up accordingly. Sport is just one of many ways in which people, including schoolchildren, enjoy themselves.

I would suggest in fact that the general idea of a ‘school break’ is to give schoolchildren a break. To give them some time, that is, to unwind and do as they please within the limits of good sense. That may include spotting caterpillars, digging canals, playing marbles, and passing round really, really evil objects in tree houses.

One might object that sport is by far better than all of these things, that it produces healthy bodies, that healthy bodies make for healthy minds, and that discipline is one of the basic building blocks of social order.

Only it’s not the case that the football-playing boys have grown into fitter and healthier adults than the canal-digging ones. Nor are they cleverer as far as I can tell. As for discipline, well, that’s exactly my point about the function of a ‘break’.

I’m not usually given to waxing nostalgic about my school days. I remember them as mostly arid and boring and on occasion quite dreadful.

On this one, however, I’m glad I didn’t grow up in the age of turf and tracksuit regimes. The grass on the plateau was wilder, taller, and definitely greener.

mafalzon@hotmail.com