Disrespecting our heritage

Sliema celebrated the feast of Stella Maris last weekend, an event attended by hundreds of people but one could not help noticing the reckless driving of e-scooters through the crowded onlookers.

To add insult to injury, people on e-scooters had the cheek to drive through the actual religious procession with complete disrespect for our culture. Shame on our government and the authorities for bringing our beloved Malta to such degradation of having these so-called two-penny tourists with no respect for our culture.

Bare-chested men and girls in bikini tops are the quality tourists that our government boasts about. We have become the riff-raff of the Mediterranean. It’s about time the Maltese wake up from their slumber as we will soon be losing our identity and heritage.

MICHAEL VELLA – Sliema

Stop noisy petards

On Saturday, August 19, during the night, residents in the harbour area had to bear the ear-splitting noise of petards of a village feast. Obviously, no restful sleep was possible. These petards cause noise and air pollution.

Also, it is a well-known fact that the vibration caused by petards can damage buildings. Furthermore, no consideration whatsoever is given to babies, sick people or animals.

Immediate action should be taken to stop these noisy petards.

PHYLLIS SAMMUT SMITH – Gżira

Beyond these shores

Alexiei Dingli, a professor of artificial intelligence and an academic, always writes cogently, and his piece about secondary education (August 20) is no exception.

The first point he makes is that many Maltese rarely venture their thinking beyond our shores. So, it’s not surprising that the university radio station has cut down on BBC World Service transmission time. Weekdays, between 8 and 9am, we now have a “university jukebox” and, at weekends, when up to 10am the BBC World Service has an international news discussion programme with invited experts, our university radio discusses local social and political matters.

Nothing wrong in that but the local stuff could be put on after 10am if our ‘intelliġenzja’ station was really interested in making locals aware of what’s going on in minds outside these shores.

Dingli then recommends a thorough overhaul of secondary education whereby factual learning and memorising is largely replaced by discussion, analysis and projects.  It all sounds forward-looking but is he sure that, in his own backyard, there still aren’t teachers still running a ‘glorified secondary school’, expecting university students to disgorge, in exam, notes they’ve been given and no other possible version of the problem in question?

Is our university a ‘glorified secondary school’? Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

Tertiary education has an ingrained problem of an ever-expanding knowledge (particularly in the sciences) combined with a fixed number of course-duration years. For example, a 1930s book of medicine would carry this one sentence on a principal blood constituent, “haemoglobin is a red pigment that carries oxygen”, while current knowledge on haemoglobin occupies a whole volume.

Scientific knowledge is in constant flux and rapid obsolescence, another important consideration in quality education. For example, the Mater Dei University Hospital pathology laboratory maintains obsolete criteria on how to diagnose early diabetes type 2, which is difficult to explain, this being a fundamental public health issue.

As soon as I emigrated to London in the early 1970s, I noticed in a bookshop one of the earliest travel guides to Malta, a pocket-sized booklet in which the English authoress expressed her views about us Maltese in its introduction: “Friendly and welcoming people but be careful how you communicate with them because they are very sensitive and easily offended, believing their tiny island is the centre of the universe.”

Hopefully, some of us may have moved on from this mentality.

Dingli’s ideas will also help.

ALBERT CILIA-VINCENTI – Attard