Roamer's column

"If you think education is expensive", ran an advertisement in The New York Times, "try ignorance". Education in Malta is expensive. The State forks out scores of millions of liri to see children through kindergarten, primary, secondary and post-secondary education and education of the tertiary kind. Still, and perhaps ironically, the provision of education does not eliminate ignorance.

The overhaul of the physical infrastructure under Dr Louis Galea's ministry has been and continues to be, impressive. It costs plenty, as they say, but it is worthwhile. The superstructure, the teaching profession, has quality but can no doubt do with more. Bring back the Teachers' Training College.

Without entering into the merits of what they learn, how much they learn, many schoolchildren do so inside buildings that for the most part are a credit to the country, aesthetically if these schools have been built from scratch (St Benedict immediately comes to mind, but it is by no means the only one), and in terms of learning equipment. Today, the computer, which was regarded with such horror by Messrs Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici 20 years ago, is, so to speak, at most children's fingertips.

The University has been enlarged. Post-secondary school and University students will nudge 16,000 next October. MCAST, in which huge investments are being made (a further Lm50 million in improvements and an intended expansion to take in 10,000 students, twice the current student population) is thriving - there were more than 3,000 applications to join, come October.

The world that Maltese youths face has compelled the white-collar workforce to change dramatically. Malta no longer is an island cut off from the main. In the age we live in, no island is an island. Enterprise, the technology sector, face competition within, which is good, and competition from without, which is better. We have attracted enterprise to our shores that we would not have had a chance in hell of enticing to our shores a couple of decades ago (pharmaceuticals for example, aircraft repair, all manner of IT-centred activities) when the education deficit was at a dismal low - precisely because the age of IT technology simply could not be ignored.

The future, which is with us, compels us to adopt new profiles, ones that until recently did not featured high on the careers list. Science and technology were not considered the greatest thing since sliced bread in the minds of school leavers - up to now, that is.

Dr Galea was aware in 2005 that he had to make these disciplines more attractive to would-be disciples. One carrot he dangled before their eyes was a higher stipend. This brought about a 25 per cent increase in the number of students following this course. From next October their stipend will vary from Lm4,020 (the minimum wage plus) to Lm7,620. B.Sc. nursing students will also be receiving an increase.

So be it; but a caveat is in order. The stipend must be earned - by attendance, by assessments, by results in the first year that warrant keeping the student on for further studies. To join the world of science and technology the demand on them to demonstrate that they are truly motivated should be intense. Taxpayers deserve to know that their money has not been invested in semi-morons who pocket large sums of money that we fork out for their benefit - and ours.

And by the way, once families of students are so handsomely helped, so should the burden of parents who send their children to private schools be lifted. These relieve the government of educating their children at a higher cost than that charged by private schools. The State ought to recognise far more generously than it does at present, and as a matter of equity, that private education fees, as well as health insurance premiums, which provide insurers with a private health service that would otherwise have to be provided by the State at an immense, additional cost, should be exempt from income tax. An effort in the case of school fess has been made. It is too small.

To go back to that advertisement; it was correct, of course. So was the remark made by President George Bush nearly 20 years ago when Malta was starting to recover from the education deficit Mr Mintoff and Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, obsessed with Church schools and mindless of the morass in state schools and in University, left behind in 1987. "Education", he had said at the time, "is the first step on the ladder to economic empowerment." And so it is.

Having said all that, one must add that the qualified man is not necessarily an educated man in the sense that matters, in the way he thinks, the way he speaks, the way he discusses things, the ethics that should guide his life. For these qualities, attributes, the remaining rungs of the ladder have to be climbed.

I beg your pardon

Whenever something out of the ordinary happens, an equally extraordinary reaction unfolds. Take, if you can, the case of the two ADT officials. They accepted bribes, not once but on a number of occasions. They were interdicted after the courts found them guilty; interdicted not because the court thought they should be, or because interdiction was one of a number of alternative punishments available to the court. From what I can make out, the court had no alternative. This means they are henceforth forbidden to hold public employment in any capacity for the rest of their lives.

There are those who argue that this is as it should be. Public officials must be above reproach and if their integrity is not up to the standards demanded, any demonstration of a lack of it requires such a punishment if only to uphold the good name of the service. There is a great deal to be said for this. Weaken on this point and you threaten the entire structure, runs the argument. The deterrence against venality has to be one of shock and awe. I see most of that, but I see something else that many others would not even consider.

Our Constitution allows a mechanism that is called a presidential pardon. Dr Ranier Fsdani, with whom I find myself in agreement far more times than in disagreement, referred to this in a piece he wrote in his Thursday column in The Times just over a fortnight ago. He called it by its proper name, "the prerogative of mercy", and argued that it exists to "safeguard equity in the administration of justice (and) protects us all. Without it, there would be aspects of our legal system that would be inhumane".

An interdiction should not be beyond the redemption of pardon and this, if for no other reason, for that of equity. I am not saying that pardon should necessarily be conferred; nor that the mechanism of pardon should be in any way disgraced, still less that lawyers should lightly make use of it. I am saying it should be available to all, and that public officials should not be excluded from 'the prerogative of mercy'; if it is not, the presidential pardon should be deleted from our Constitution - which it must not be.

Unless we have, at one and the same time, a corrupt Minister of Justice, a corrupt Attorney-General, a corrupt Commissioner of Police, a corrupt Director of Prisons and a corrupt President, the concept is manifestly just, ethically irreproachable and morally acceptable. What should emerge from any discussion is neither hysteria nor contempt, just one simple question: has the concept been trivialised?

Cool and sweaty

There has not been a summer quite like this in the context of entertainment. Some of it turns me on not at all. One man's turn-off is another's turn-on. Tens of thousands of the young and not so young defied the heat and added to it by attending in vast numbers at a series of pop concerts. Enrique Iglesias wowed what has been claimed as a record turnout at the Granaries.

As if the summer heat were not enough, the crowd found the energy to dance in an atmosphere of sweat and, I should imagine, and amid waves of body odour, but what the hell. More important for Malta, I suppose is the hour-long programme of the event that will be broadcast to MTV's audience, rated as being 166 million. Can the MTA nick some of that footage to show that audience more of the island than the Granaries?

The Malta Summerfest laid on by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts provides a welcome counterpoint for those who prefer their entertainment to be culturally different. Here again, I wonder how much the MTA used this festival to advertise Malta as a place where Shakespeare and Ibsen are known and played, Flamenco danced, where Brazilian clowns clown - and get into trouble! - and Glenn Miller's swing music, jazz and all manner of rock, is performed and sung; and where a Mediterranean Music Academy, launched in Rome and to be based in Malta will have Ricardo Muti as its honorary president.

Compensation at a cost

I may have got this wrong, but I don't think so. Some $400 million are being passed on to the Libyan HIV patients who, a Libyan court ruled, had been deliberately infected by Bulgarian nurses, among others. These and a doctor of Palestinian origin but of Bulgarian nationality were in a Libyan prison for the past eight years. They were sentenced to death. They appealed and lost the appeal. The EU and European governments intervened and called for their release on the grand that the HIV patients had been infected before the nurses had arrived in Libya. To no avail.

Then suddenly the French managed it. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Mrs Sarkozy flew out to Libya. Their release followed and this was, in turn, followed by an announcement by President Sarkozy that Libya had agreed to let the Bulgarian nationals go. No money had passed hands. I could not make out whether those $400 million were, in fact, baguettes, or tapas, or bratwurst, or olives, or even Gbejniet. Yet somehow I had this disturbing feeling that 400 million dollars were purely, surely, 400 million greenbacks.

Let us go along with the theory that this was a humane act. My only problem with it is that I did not witness a similar generosity extended to the five nurses and the doctor, who were sentenced to death and who, we learned from a newspaper interview with the doctor at the presidential palace where they were residing, "were tortured" during a ten-month long police investigation. "It was hell we went through", the doctor was quoted as saying. The worst part of it was when "they threatened to bring one of my sisters and rape her in front of me. At that point I agreed to sign anything, and confess to anything, just to stop that nightmare".

Not surprisingly, the six received a presidential pardon in Bulgaria. It would be gauche to say that this is not the point, but in fact it is not. The point is the wrongfully accused Bulgarians who were found to be suffering, and I quote the newspaper report, "from hypertonic, neurological, gynaecological and stomach illnesses, as well as severe psychological trauma".

What compensation are they being offered by Libya, which has just signed a multi-million dollar contract with France? If, as is likely, they are being offered none, what humane and financial solidarity is being shown by those who, in all humanness offered financial solidarity to the Libyan victims? None, I fear.

Quote...

Today it is not one of the bases or one of the consequences of Christianity that is exposed to attack: the stroke is directed directly at its heart. The Christian conception of life, Christian spirituality, the inward attitude which, more than any particular act or outward gesture, bespeaks the Christian - that is what is at stake. How timid those men seem who... fought against the Church but wanted top keep the Gospel! Or those who, while claiming to be released from all authority and all faith, still invoked principles derived from a Christian source!" (Dr Joe Mizzi, et al. please note).

"They had persuaded themselves that "it was possible to preserve the benefits of Christianity while ceasing to be Christians"...Those who have come after them... lump them together with believers in a common reprobation. Those of the new generation... have no desire to live upon the perfume of an empty vase. It is the whole of Christianity that they are setting aside - and replacing. Jesus had brought about "a reversal of values"; it is a reversal of values that they are undertaking in their turn." (EU leaders, please note)

(Henri de Lubac; The Drama of Atheist Humanism; 1944; second printing of seventh English edition, 1998)