Following our investigation about Malta’s education system, we have received a lot of feedback from a number of different professionals. It is extremely alarming and concerning how Labour has crushed education standards in Malta and is effectively dumbing down future generations.
From most of the feedback that we have gathered from different professionals in the education system, we have learnt some alarming facts which have led to this rapid decline in education standards. Firstly, the system has been dead-set against smart children.
In 2011, the Nationalist government abolished streaming and bundled drastically different-performing children into one group. The abolition of streaming was not made on educational grounds, meaning that its abolition was not intended to improve education standards or the level of education: it was meant as a political move for the sake of “integration” and “equality”. This means that the smartest children have been bundled with much lower-performing students, and now have to sit through an education that is far below previous levels. The education system has now created an inherent bias against smart and high-performing children simply to prevent the parents of lower-performing children from being offended. The result is that smart and high-performing students in public schools are being offered a substandard level of education.
Secondly, there is a new culture of over-diagnosis of different children who are being targeted by psychologists and psychiatrists in a wild racket where every difference is being diagnosed as a mental-health condition such as ADHD. A child is misbehaving? It’s ADHD. Children are even being prescribed pills and psychology sessions simply for being different, with a class of psychologists and psychiatrists benefiting from this racket through high fees and condemning many children to an unnecessary diagnosis that follows them for the rest of their lives, along with an even more substandard level of education.
Thirdly, the education system is no longer incentivising smart and high-performing children out of fear of offending lower-performing children. Previously, smart children were incentivised and rewarded with a multitude of activities that celebrated their intelligence. Back in my day, we even had TV and radio programmes in which smart children represented their schools in knowledge and intelligence contests filled with difficult puzzles and hard questions. Nowadays, the focus is on “participation” and “effort”. Children are increasingly not rewarded for their results and are simply praised just for showing up.
Smart children have been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and are nowadays at risk of being over-diagnosed by unscrupulous professionals.
Lastly, parents are also to blame. Parents increasingly pretend that children should have a good time at school, completely abolishing the concept of a merit-based system that rewards effort and hard work for the sake of having it easy. There’s even an insane discussion going on about removing homework altogether.
This is a major tragedy in the making, as we are suppressing smart children and their future prospects.
We need politicians who are brave enough to admit the truth. Statistics clearly show the crashing standards of our education system, and unless someone takes the bull by the horns, we are going to lose whole generations of smart and high-performing children as they become increasingly alienated and suppressed.
Smart children need to be defended, celebrated and promoted. Yet this process of dumbing down the education system is also aligned with Labour’s ongoing dumbing down of society. This is a major ongoing crisis and needs to be addressed.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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