The office of the Children’s Commissioner is a waste of space, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Take Pauline Miceli, who was recently appointed to the post, and whose mission statement proclaims its very pointlessness. “I like to help children… If children are unhappy, I will try to help,” she tells us.
Ambitious though it may be, making children happy isn’t the most specific or well-defined of briefs. It’s shared by Ronald McDonald, Disney, and the makers of Kinder Surprise, as well as the rest of humanity. I’ve yet to meet someone who intentionally sets out to make children unhappy.
The inherent banality of the office means that Children’s Commissioners find themselves in a permanent existential crisis. Since they have no real powers, and nothing to contribute other than the bleeding obvious, they spend their time justifying their own existence and congratulating themselves for doing so.
In practice, this translates into the occasional nannying sermon on some or other quixotic cause. There’s also a mascot called Ġuġinu, but they needn’t have bothered. That’s because the Commissioner herself is a mascot for the most bizarre form of work imaginable, namely a kind of secular priesthood that is funded by public money and enjoys the use of office space and a staff.
If the religious kind is open only to men, the opposite is true of the secular priesthood. All four Children’s Commissioners have been women, and it seems that only women’s hands are fit to be consecrated to tend to children’s needs. Rather a departure from the usual ‘shared responsibility’ official doctrine, but never mind.
Which brings me to the current incumbent, who gave an interview to this newspaper last Sunday. Given what I’ve said about the office, it follows that the inaugural interview should be the greatest sermon of all and the one that reminds us that the Commissioner is there and does stuff.
I hope there won’t be many more of them. The interview made it clear that, even by the standards of a drawerful of weary blades, Miceli isn’t the sharpest.
Take her point on education. I don’t doubt it went down well with the thousands of parents who are condemned to the Promethean task of helping children with their homework. Nor do I doubt it’s complete rubbish.
The inherent banality of the office means that Children’s Commissioners find themselves in a permanent existential crisis
Children, Miceli told us, are being “burdened with useless information”. Useless, because “if you want facts, all you need to do is switch on your internet and find the numbers”. I had to read that twice. First, because of its poor form – you don’t ‘switch on your internet’. Second, because of its outrageous content.
The last time I checked, ‘useless information’ was called ‘knowledge’. It was thought to be a good thing to have in your mind, as opposed to somewhere out there in cyberspace or indeed in a library. Education was all about imparting that knowledge.
Instead, Miceli wants “discussion” and “critical thinking”. Nice-sounding buzzwords, except it is not possible to discuss or think critically about things you don’t know. Knowledge and critical thinking usually go together. All the people I know who possess great knowledge are also able to think critically. I also know people whose empty minds churn out reams of vacant and formulaic discussion. True to Miceli canon, the latter tend to have tablets surgically grafted onto their hands.
The Commissioner then moved on to the predictable field of sex and gender. Apparently, children who are encouraged to learn modelling and wear adult clothes are little more than “mini-troias” (mini-sluts, whatever that means). Miceli also finds herself “saddened” by the Church’s position paper on gay conversion therapy.
Whether or not these opinions are valid, they are nothing but an instance of the secular priestess in patronising and sermonising mode. The point on mini-troias is also offensive and betrays Miceli’s misunderstanding of and prejudices against social circles other than that of the ballet and piano lessons kind.
The third gem of the day had to do with, surprise, the environment. “As Maltese,” the Commissioner told us, “we seem adverse (sic) to open spaces… we always feel the need to remove trees and fill it up with concrete”. Grammar aside, the cocktail of national-character stereotypes and wrong assumptions (trees have actually increased enormously in recent years) is breathtaking.
In the same vein Miceli also said that we need to provide adolescents with “safe and adequate” places where they can “congregate”. She probably thinks that the State should cordon off fields, plant them with saplings, put up boards with positive messages, install CCTV and Wi-Fi (useless knowledge to be avoided at all times), and congratulate itself on the lack of mini-troias.
I was not surprised that the interview was described by many as a breath of fresh air. Formulaic and staid rhetoric sells well, and Miceli is the triumph of that rhetoric. First, because she is the Children’s Commissioner. Second, because she is Pauline Miceli.
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