Excuse me? Since when does the capacity (and indeed, the freedom) for critical thought fly out of the window the moment someone is handed something that wasn’t purchased or paid for directly by that person in some way or another. Should we, as students, be so grateful to receive a ‘free’ education that we should immediately cease analysing it critically and seeking ways to improve and make it the best it could be?
Another point that amazed me was the idea of ‘free education’. Silly me, here was I thinking that our education was actually being paid for by the government, and, by extension, by the tax payers. Either the person to whom Matthew Mizzi was referring to was unaware of that minute [read: colossal] detail, or was under the impression that education, like magic money, grew on trees. It is public funding that is paying for our education, so it is, in real terms, by no means free.
Should we stop concerning ourselves with how public funding is spent, and not analyse critically how the fruits of public funding can put to better use? Should we stop looking into how the National Healthcare system or the Law Enforcement system can be optimised? Hey, its free, so we have no right to complain about it in the first place, right?
I had a ridiculous little notion
that one of the main points of education, and, especially, tertiary
university-level education, was to instil into students the capacity to think
critically and to ask questions that nobody else was asking. No society ever developed either
intellectually, technologically, or spiritually by sticking to what was tried
and tested and not attempting to improve on what was already there. To learn is to think, and to learn without
questioning is to think without questioning, which is quite the paradox.
A state-funded educational system
is the fruit of the whole of society,
and as the intellectual and social ‘product’ of that society, youth benefiting
from that education have the duty to analyse it critically and make sure it is
the best that it can be. Stifling
complaints and lightly dismissing critical thought is not only socially
irresponsible, but also demonstrates a short-sightedness that serves as a
pretty good litmus test of sorts to show that those who subscribe to such a
thought must see the world beyond the bridge of their nose as a fuzzy multicoloured
smear.
Nestor Laiviera is one of the News Editors of The Insiter, the monthly student newspaper produced by InSite. www.insite.org.mt