Pressure on Matsec students (2)

How right Ms Mamo is! My son, who sat for that exam, informed me that he was refused further paper to complete his essays. I laughed, and asked him to stop joking. He insisted that he was not. Amazingly, he wasn't. Unbelievable!

Was the exam aimed at seeing if the students could complete so many words in their essays on two pages? What about the content?

The mind boggles! I am a semi-retired doctor, and a former trainer of young doctors in the art of Family Medicine or General Practice in the British Army. During the continuous assessments of my junior colleagues, I might have occasionally restricted them to writing a maximun number of words. There was no limit as to how many pages those words were written on!

Recently, we Maltese have had some awful and extremely worrying statistics thrown at us. As a doctor, I am stressed just mentioning the following facts, which really should shame us all:

1. We have some of the most overweight and obese children in Europe. These are all at increased risk of diabetes, ischaemic heart disease and early death later on in life.

2. We also have the least educated workforce in Europe, with the lowest percentage of persons between 25 and 64 who have completed upper secondary and tertiary education.

3. Among our youths, heroin and other drugs are a very big problem in this country.

In the light of all the above, we cannot even offer our stressed students extra paper during such tense times! Are we trying to help or hinder them?

However, let us not despair about such an unsatisfactory situation in these islands. Surely, this is a 'wake-up' call.

We must start acting to improve such abysmal statistics. Whether we like it or not, they make us seem like the 'lame duck' of the European Union. Each and every one of us Maltese has got a duty to ensure that we start moving up that ladder and improve ourselves. We owe it to ourselves and to our progeny.