There are two kinds of people in the world: those who seek to emancipate minds and those who would see them sink first.
The former phenotype of homo sapiens is now perched on the brink of extinction. A plucky, unlikely survivor of an age when words helped to explain and overcome reality rather than blur its features, it will soon fall to the United Nations to classify him as an endangered species and grant him sanctuary in wildlife reservations.
This coelacanth of Darwinian resolve is besieged on all sides by the second kind of human being, an organism having the opposable thumbs, upright posture and correct number of vertebrae to biologically qualify as "human" but lacking notable characteristics that separate him from the higher apes, namely love of truth, hatred of deception and the miraculous and now almost autistic-savant ability of telling the two apart.
It is to the second kind of human being - homo LOL! - that Marthese Portelli's The Changing Face Of Education (May 12) is directed.
Hers is an article swarming with untested assumptions of agreement: "Malta boasts one of the highest standards of education in the world with one of the best educational set ups accessible to everyone." You might ask: Best by whose standards? With what aim in mind? "The Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology proudly trains over 5,000 students full-time and 2,600 part-time." With what rate of success? With what expectation of employment?
Dr Portelli is not alarmed by the social deformities wrought by monopoly, capitalism and consumer culture. In fact, she kowtows to them: "Our children are being given better and more effective tools to be able to be flexible at the workplace and to be more adaptable to and within society. A job for life is a concept of the past." Apart from the vacuity of the jargon words "effective", "flexible" and "adaptable", this statement only serves as pablum and nostrum for a savage reality: increased job instability. Are we to clap and cheer? Is workplace nomadism a virtue to be aspired to?
Meaningless phrases pour out of her word processor like grateful kids at the end of a school day: "The educational system is now looking at empowering children to be participants in their education rather than recipients." You mean they're allowed to ask questions? Some innovation!
Ostentation is also mistaken for progress: "This Administration has invested heavily in the sector. This investment is real and can be seen with one new school being built every year and others undergoing extensive renovation." It is perhaps futile to point this out but it isn't brick and mortar that makes a school, but the quality of the education imparted within its walls. What guarantee do we have of that?
For all her article's zippy, high-glucose words, you'd think this was a Shangri-La she was talking about, not brainwashed old Malta: "This is a country of opportunities and we are a government that does not leave anyone behind, shut anyone out." Of course, every doubt one might have nurtured about the purpose of her article clears up in an instant when one reads the little caption beneath her name: "Dr Portelli is president of the Nationalist Party's executive committee." It's good to see somebody's education paying off for once, isn't it?