Mary Ann Cauchi's Talking Point feature, unimaginatively entitled Education Is Our Future (March 9), is the sort of entirely forgettable, one-dimensional article which newspapers have made the workhorse of their business model. Piling buzzword upon buzzword, repeating shopworn exhortations until they ring with the force of truth, and sailing home on a current of neutered, PR-approved copy, these platitudes act as agents of mental pollution by powering down the thought process and bypassing all of the reader's critical faculties.
In promoting 2010's Learning Expo, Ms Cauchi lobs a live grenade over our heads without offering an exit strategy on its implications: "Education is all about maximising on our human capital, the one true resource we fall back on as a nation."
How populist and meretricious. Never has the utilitarian element of education been pitched so glaringly and blatantly as a goal in itself. "Gone are the days when a person can leave Form V and be ready to join the labour market with a good expectation of finding a job - and a well-paying job at that," she explains. "For education is a lifetime pursuit. Without constantly updating ourselves and keeping abreast of the latest developments, through continuous professional development, each one of us will become obsolete."
Am I to believe that my utility and the very quality and character of my existence on earth turns upon the impermanence of my stock of "useful knowledge" and the frantic pace at which I am forced to pursue it? Where it even true that "education = €€€" (It isn't; graft, street-smarts and lack of scruple will determine how much money you pull in), it would still be wickedly depleted and bankrupt to define it exclusively in those terms.
Everybody knows that an individual's character is formed by the environment in which he lives, and which gives him his language skills, tastes and morals. This is the real meaning of "education" and therefore there can be no real education without a proper assessment of an individual's entire environment. How can Ms Cauchi speak of education solely in terms of employability when the same educational institutions she speaks of have been undermined, not only by advertisers and propagandists but also by the passing of the inner-directed, ruggedly idiosyncratic scholar (perhaps odd, querulous and vain but unmercenary and passionately committed to ideas), and his replacement by the smooth, other-directed, fund-raising and empire-building academic executive, who chooses his opinions, stances and morals as he does his friends: that is, in accordance with their usefulness to his career?
What she is proposing - educating merely in terms of global success and competitiveness - is terminally narrow-minded and kills the innate love of learning in far too many people.
She could certainly benefit from the advice found in Don Quixote's prologue: "Study to explain your thoughts, and set them in their truest light, labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible," meaning of course that it would be best for her to stop referring to "education" when what she really means is "meal ticket and parasitic portfolio of money-making skills".