The well-known priest, Fr Colin Apap, has an agony uncle column of sorts in the Sunday paper It-Torca. This is where he dispenses advice to those readers who write in with their problems or whatever is irking them.

Perhaps we could do away with schooling altogether, teach our children a smattering of textese, arm them with smartphones and they’re good to go- Claire Bonello

Last week’s problem page caught my eye. Under the heading, ‘Stressed parents and children’ was a letter from a very harried mother.

She wrote in saying that the stress-levels in her household run very high during the exam season. Her children had too much to do, they just couldn’t cope with the plethora of subjects they had to study.

The letter-writer was at her wit’s end because she felt she couldn’t help them out in their studies – the subjects taught at school and the ways in which they were taught had changed considerably since her days at school.

Her children are always slinking off to their rooms to play games online, to spend time on Facebook or to tap away at their new electronic gadgets. Their mother felt they were losing their social skills in the real world – though they spent long hours chatting away online.

She explained how she works as an unpaid chauffeur for her children – ferrying them around to catechism lessons, gym, dance classes, football practice and many other extracurricular activities. At the end of the day, our letter-writer feels like a wrung-out dishcloth – her exhaustion makes her lash out at her husband and children.

She rounds off her SOS by making an appeal: she wants to kick off a campaign to reduce the number of compulsory subjects studied at school. In her opinion the study of foreign languages should be axed from the curriculum. Or rather, she thinks English should be the only compulsory language taught at school.

According to her, learning Italian, French or German is pointless as people can get by pretty well if they are fluent in English, seeing it is widely spoken in many countries.

As for Maltese – that too should get the boot. Her children can speak and understand it well enough, so please can we just dump it and stick to English, giving parents and children a breather in the process?

I suppose that on a certain level, this woman’s plea strikes a chord with many other stressed parents. Coaxing their children to swot up and study for exams is a mood-dampener.

There are few things more depressing than having to cram up on irregular Italian verbs and getting to grips with maths theorems while the rest of the world is on the beach. But my sympathies don’t extend further.

The woman calling for a paring down of the number of languages taught at school is representative of a growing cohort of people who want to do nothing more than that which is strictly necessary. I meet people like this quite often.

From the snatches of conversation I overhear, it seems they’re miffed at having to do or study anything which does not translate into immediate gratification or financial reward.

Languages? Why bother? We can get by with pidgin English and Google Translate. Algebra? What on earth for? Geography and history? Wikipedia is a much more convenient (and effortless) way of getting the low down on key facts and figures.

And don’t get them started on poetry and literature – the totally extraneous subjects sucking up our youngsters’ waking hours and depriving them of the company of family and friends.

People like our letter-writer rail against the time, the effort and the expense involved in doing anything beyond that which is needed to get by. All their energies are directed at having the bar lowered instead of making the effort to leap over it.

The prospect of this mentality taking root even further is a dismal one. With this kind of mind-set, the intangible benefits of appreciating different cultures, learning about the history of man and the beauty of literature are shunned and a strictly utilitarian approach is preferred.

Instead of broadening horizons and developing their sensitivities to the complexities of life, people will simply do the least possible to satisfy their immediate physical and material desires. People will no longer bother to develop the mental muscle required to solve complex problems or even to place their experiences within any meaningful context.

Perhaps we could do away with schooling altogether, teach our children a smattering of textese, arm them with smartphones and they’re good to go. The only problem with that would be that they’d all be terribly dull, callow people with an insular mentality.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt