Something like 54,500 kids and youngsters from the age of three to 16 got out of bed last week and crept, if the Bard remains a reliable source, snail-like and unwillingly, certainly rain-struck, to one of 277 schools.
Sixty-nine of these are run by the Church, 39 are private schools, that is, fee-paying. As our pre-teens or teenagers settled into a new term, it crossed my mind, I know not with how much relevance, that not one of them was born when Alfred Sant took over the leadership of the then Malta Labour party from the hapless Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in 1992; and yet the eldest of them will be queuing up to vote – in 2013; strange things, time and circumstances.
Umberto Calosso, once a household name, no longer has a role to play in the education of secondary schoolchildren. Like so many other establishments it has done its job and awaits whatever the lapidary equivalent is, of a clapper’s yard. At the same time, two literally sparkling new schools in Mosta and Gozo came into service as islets of learning
What we must now expect is the government’s achievement of its objective to make the island a centre of excellence in the learning industry and, as taxpayers, that teachers and students knuckle down to the hard slog of obtaining results that justify the costs.
One would hope that in this process, parents whose primary responsibility many will be surprised to learn is the education of their children, will take on that duty – not as pestering busybodies demanding to know why Kylie this and Demi that, but as serious participants in the preparation of their kids for higher studies, vocational crafts and life; We entertain another valid hope, that the teacher, to quote Pope Benedict, understands he “is more than someone who imparts knowledge or skills… (but) also one who equips a student with the wisdom necessary to live a full life.”
The same applies to a greater degree in the case of tutors and lecturers at the University, where there are great temptations to battle against. Writing in the September issue of The American Spectator, philosopher Roger Scruton reminded us that for Cardinal John Henry Newman, “The university is a society in which the student absorbs the graces and accomplishments of a higher form of life. In (it)… the pursuit of truth and the active discussion of its meaning are integrated into a wider culture, in which the ideal of the gentleman is acknowledged as the standard…” for Newman, “the general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already”.
At the top table of our education system, do the students catch “the detail, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us… from those in whom it lives already’? More to the point, are these there to be caught?
The Budget already?
What a rush time is in. It feels like it was only yesterday that Budget 2010 was being presented to Parliament and here we are, nearly a year later, about to learn what Budget 2011 has in store.
Given the financial and economic turmoil unleashed in 2008 by financial instability and bear markets that edged the world as close to the abyss as the world could be nudged without disintegrating, all indications are that Tonio Fenech will report on an astonishingly good year.
Industrial production rose each month over the past six months by 6 per cent to 12 pc; manufacturers; exports grew by more than 30 pc in the first six months; unemployment at 6.5 pc was the fourth lowest rate registered in the EU.
A remarkably buoyant financial sector actually prospered in an EU environment where big names crashed and had to be rescued by billions of euros of taxpayer money; austerity plans became the order of the day. Many countries are still struggling to cut their way through dense thickets, even now; hence the demonstrations in many parts of Europe protesting against job cuts, tax increases and the hauling back of public expenditure.
For reasons best known to it, the General Workers’ Union felt it should do the same here, where a potentially critical situation was stabilised by swift and successful government intervention to protect jobs – and to create new ones.
From Spain to Greece, Britain to Lithuania, stringent measures to prevent bankruptcy were taken, are still being taken. Brussels, unimaginative as it sometimes tends to be, is proposing new penalties against member states necessarily running deficits. Malta, and I am touching every piece of wood around me, has weathered the crisis handsomely, which is not to say we are out of, erm, the woods.
Now must be the time for the finance minister to be at his most alert as he fleshes out his plans for 2011. It was disconcerting to hear members of the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development (MCESD) complaining about a dearth of consultation by the minister. Fenech should deal promptly with these complaints, not least because if reports that have appeared are correct, they are well grounded. A couple of meetings to discuss the innards of Budget 2011 are not nearly enough; it has not been Fenech’s style to limit pre-budget consultation in the past; on the contrary.
October 25 is being touted as the most likely date for Budget Day; if the minister and the MCESD need to put their heads together five, six times to reach as much agreement as is humanly possible on the thrust and direction of Budget 2011, and if this requires October 25 to give way to the first or second week of November, so be it.
More important than a date on the calendar is the need to reach as broad a consensus as possible. This does not mean allowing the MCESD crowd to get into nit-picking mood; it means an honest-to-goodness dialogue between both in the context of a difficult year that is ending and a new year during which no hostages are offered to fortune.
One last remark: Fenech should not transform a three pc deficit target into a holy grail. Instead, he should consider the benefits of tax cuts where these are most needed.
Godsmacked!
How the God-botherers and Pope-baiters and haters must have writhed as they read their newspapers after Pope Benedict, so vilified before his visit to the United Kingdom, returned in triumph to Rome. Take Ross Douthat in The New York Times:
“The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain over the weekend must have been a disappointment to his legions of detractors. Their bold promise notwithstanding, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens didn’t manage to clap the Pope in irons and haul him off to jail. The protests against (his) presence proved a sideshow to the visit, rather than the main event. And the threat (happily empty, it turned out) of an assassination plot a reminder of what real religious extremism looks like – as opposed to the gentle scholar, swathed in white, urging secular Britons to look with fresh eyes at their island’s ancient faith.”
Take Stephen Glover, not spectacularly partial to Pope or faith, in The Daily Mail: “Pope Benedict’s declarations over the past few days have been remark-able and, in modern Britain, virtually unprecedented. They were delivered in the calmest, meekest and least ranting way possible, and yet they carried a great authority that largely comes, I think, from the Pope’s evident goodness as well as from the dignity of his office. Even hard-hearted cynics and sceptics could not fail to listen.”
Take a somewhat forlorn, dejected Andrew Brown, in The Guardian: “This was the end of the British Empire. In all the four centuries from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, England has been defined as a Protestant nation. The Catholics were Other; sometimes violent terrorists and rebels, sometimes merely dirty immigrants.
“The sense that this was a nation specially blessed by God… was central to English self-understanding… For all of those 400 or so years it would have been unthinkable that a Pope should stand in Westminster Hall and praise Sir Thomas More, who died to defend the Pope’s sovereignty against the King’s. Rebellion against the pope was the foundational act of English power. And now the power is gone, and perhaps the rebellion has gone, too.”
Take Brendan O’Neill, an atheist, who targeted a magnificently underperforming Protest the Pope crowd: “The phrase ‘motley crew’ could have been invented for this gathering… There was a generous smattering of ageing lesbians and gay activists, getting one last wear out of their radical-queer bishop and nuns outfits from the 1970s. There were refugees from the rump of the old left, mostly from the Extreme Social Inadequacy Tendency. And then there were the professional secularists and humanists, who took to the stage one by one to try to out-adjective each other in their expressions of fear and loathing for the Pope.”
As things are working out, New Atheism is turning out to be a garrulous washout, the object of their hatred, in this instance, a caricature of a caricature; not quite Enlightenment stuff. It barked its shin not against what the leader in this newspaper a fortnight ago wrongly, in my view, described as a “media-savvy” Pope (none has been less savvy). It came up against a man whose heart spoke unto hearts and discovered a resonance in scores of millions of them, the high and the mighty, the low and the lowly,
Catholics and non-Catholics alike, in Britain and abroad.