The Downward Learning Curve

“Hey teacher,” sang a cherubic choir in overwrought prog rockers Pink Floyd’s seminal hit, Another Brick in the Wall, “leave us kids alone”.
Few students through the decades have failed to engage with the sentiment at the heart of that song, namely that schools are little more than chambers of repression where learning happens by accident. But no classroom is complete without its clutch of nerds and teacher’s pets, which is where poor Christopher Bezzina steps into the breech.
To give him credit where it’s due, he opens his column The Capacity to Create Better Schools with an assured, telegraphic intro that is Dickens without the verboseness, Melville without the tortured introspection:

“We are living in exciting times.”

So far, so good. There is certainly no problem with setting the bar high, but let’s remember that this is The Times we are dealing with here. When it comes to bars, the Olympic gold here is in the limbo dance not the high jump.
Fittingly, Bezzina torpedoes all his early promise with possibly the most unwieldy, and definitely the least interesting, sentence ever committed to paper:

“They are exciting times for those who want to be directly involved and engaged in the educational reforms promised by the Education Reform encompassed in the amendments to the Education Act (2006), in the Reform Agreement entered into between the government and the Malta Union of Teachers in July 2007 and the various policy documents that have come out through the ministry responsible for education over the past few years.”

Bezzina is supposedly in the business of assuring quality in the education sector, which holds out no great promise for whatever tedious government initiative about which he is writing about so uninspiringly. Then again, he is a technocrat and a satisfactorily grey one at one, so no more should and could be expected of him other than the parroting of hideously vacuous government policies. The educationalists churned out of the University of Malta need to be employed somehow, after all, and what better way than getting them to overhaul the teaching sector like monkeys typing out the complete works of Shakespeare.
Could anyone be blamed for finding this paragraph, for example, as inspirational as watching a dog being run over:

“Both the Education Act and the subsequent Collective Reform Agreement (2007) recognise the need to create a context for professional learning to take place within schools and their networks and outside, and to have professional staff that work within the networks and support the networks from outside to improve and enhance the learning capabilities of everyone - adults and students alike.”

Bezzina is apparently never happy with a sentence unless it is far too long, contains at least one date and repeats the key word no less than three times. Networks anybody?
But if Bezzina is the willing executioner of this largely uninformative puff piece on how the government is saving Malta’s children from certain unproductive cretinism, who is the enabler?
An abettor of inadequacy or excess can take several shapes, from the small-time pimp to the street corner crack dealer. A most disturbing manifestation of this abusive role was shown in a Channel Four documentary in Britain some years ago about the weird and perverse men that feed their gargantuan wives to states of such criminal obesity that they can barely walk. The women become so fat, their layers of overlapping skin putrefy and turn black, unseen but detected by the sensitive nose.
It is a disgusting and cruel form of indulgence that has found its home contentedly on The Times’ editorial board, where quality assurance might as well be a tin of chocolates. Nothing is too dull, badly written, rambling and uninspiring for the weasels that get paid for copying and pasting straight from their inboxes into the publishing software.
Bezzina is little more than a pride gourd to inflate, who will provide the reams of inconsequential copy to fill all the newspaper space The Times’ utterly lunatic advertisers will not buy.
So, to get back to the article… It drones on about improvement, learning, experience, network, unifying ethos etc. And then ends with the obligatory platitude about the future, God help us:

“It is indeed an exciting time to be in education. Together we can make a difference for the youth and young adults of tomorrow.”

Indeed, indeed.
Indeed.

[Sic] Comments

In his reprehensible treatise The Revolt Against Civilization (1922), American historian and racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard laments what he perceives as the burgeoning menace of the untermensch and the burden it heaves onto the back of the ruling classes. Dwelling on the outcome of the then-recent Bolshevik revolution, he sniffily decries the notion of "natural equality" as understood by political radicals, in Russia and beyond.
Thankfully, these disturbing concepts of human stratification are little more than an ugly relic of scientific racism. Then again, too see what bedlam was unleashed when the Times of Malta website handed over the keys of the asylum to the inmates, one wonders whether Stoddard may have been onto something when he called the for the gates of civilization to be guarded.
As any faithful reader of The Times' online edition will know, the newspaper some months ago started enabling its readers to leave comments on any article, opinion and news as it may be. Sceptics, the underwritten included, scoffed at the clumsy and inept execution of the initiative.
Submitting a comment requires volunteering a quantity of information that would have satisfied even a devoted Stasi operative. In fairness, the criteria are a few degrees less stringent that those required to get a letter published in the actual newspaper. It would be no surprise to learn that The Times might once required attachment to letters to the editor to include a set of fingerprints, a mimeographed copy of a birth certificate and a signed statement from the local parish priest.
In these enlightened times, all the website asks for is a name, surname, e-mail address, town of residence and a telephone number. And to judge by the tone and volume of the comments on the site, just about anybody can qualify for connection to the telephone grid these days.
On a visit many years ago to Cairo zoo, I saw the dreadful sight of a flange of baboons pouncing on an unfortunate cat foolish enough to wander into the primates’ giant enclosure. The cat’s death was mercifully swift, but what followed was a terrifying and discordant cacophony of shrieks, grunting and dust-throwing as rivalling congresses argued over ownership of the limp corpse.
Exchanges of views on The Times website never fails to bring this tragicomic image to mind. Gratefully, the comment strands never stray far from utter absurdity and ploughing through them is a joy that vindicates the drudgery of day-to-day existence.
Picking an article at random, Sunday’s issue features the heartening news that Labour Party deputy Karl Chircop’s condition has improved slightly. Quick as a shot, the insanely pious F. Camilleri logged on to seize victory in what has apparently been a stimulating debate elsewhere on the healing powers of prayer. Not content with his unseemly celebratory dance, he follows up his own comment some 18 minutes later with this:

“This is GREAT news.
Thanks be to the Lord and Our Virgin Mary of LOURDES.”

People who capitalize their computer-based correspondence do so because they want us to imagine them shouting the words in question. So reread that snippet and try to visualize F. Camilleri shouting, the veins in his temple throbbing, in a dark room on a Sunday and imagine the monitor flecked with tiny projectiles of foamy saliva on that final sibilant.
Camilleri’s comments invariably kick off the familiar sight of an incrementally more and more indecorous crossfire of what could generously be termed as opinions. Indeed, the bulk of what The Times’ readers commit to the website has all the intellectual tone of what results from a fat man sitting on a whoopee cushion.
A story about the Mediterraneo Marine Park denying cruelty to dolphins, elicits these remarks among others. From Eric Gahn:

I wonder what [Mediterraneo director Pedro] Maghalaes would say if HE were kept in a small cage with a controlled supply of purifed air and made to jump for balls and through hoops so he could earn his keep in the small cage.

And Franco Farrugia:

Well said, Mr Cuschieri. What if dolphins could talk! (sic)
And indeed, patrons are more guilty than the keepers themselves!!!

An indignant howling-at-the-moon letter from faithful old fart John Guillaumier to complain that Paceville is no longer as it was in the days of his youth in the 1960s, “when a better class of tourists than nowadays led to the establishment of the first night-clubs and restaurants in Malta”. This kind of letter, along with the perennial favourite about how Maltese is apparently a pointless language and should be abandoned forthwith, is always guaranteed to generate the standard slew of replies.
Guillaumier’s better class of backers include Ray Axisa:

So True, what a dump Paceville has became (sic), well done with your comments.

And Joe Buttigieg:

A trip to the continent recently revealed how Malta has become the dirtiest and shabiest (sic) place in Europe.

On the other side of the argument is a disappointingly sensible set of people with unreasonably reasonable views.
The Times has in a rare effort tried to instil a climate of democratic expression on its site. What it has ended up with is a verbal version of Pong, where one opinion burped onto the site provokes, by some yet unformulated law of physics, an equally banal and ridiculous response.
But of you’re forced to choose between watching YouTube clips of chimpanzees falling out of trees and reading The Times comment pages, then you know what the right choice is.