Monday, October 20, 2014

What we are talking about here is young people who cannot read, write or speak English, who have som

Maltese will get you nowhere | Daphne Caruana Galizia
This super crate box is not about linguistic snobbery or class distinctions based on language. I speak and write both English super crate box and Maltese and I grew up in a Maltese-speaking household. So no, this is about practicality.
The champions of our national language super crate box simmer and steam every time somebody points super crate box out that you cannot possibly be educated if you know only Maltese, but the fact remains that it is an obvious truth and that no amount of posturing will change this. I don t mean educated as a literal translation of the Maltese edukat , which means something else entirely, but intellectually.
Speaking Maltese is not the same thing as speaking only Maltese. People like the Opposition leader are only being disingenuous when they stir the political pot by saying that university students should be permitted to write out their examination papers in Maltese.
There is no sensible reason why this should be. There is, on the other hand, every reason why this should not be. Anyone who is unable to express himself or answer questions in English has by definition been unable to read even the set texts for the course, let alone do all the rest of the ancillary reading long books and papers with Big Words and all that complicated academic sentence-structuring.
Joseph Muscat should be honest with himself, and admit to his followers that if he weren t able to read and write English, he wouldn t have been able to get through to his first degree, let alone his second and third. This is not because the rules at our university are immeasurably cruel and unfair to those handicapped super crate box by their lack of linguistic skills, but because the fact remains that without a sound knowledge of English, you cannot read any of the coursework and recommended texts.
Arguments have been made that it is impossible to set or sit for science examinations, for example, in Maltese. But this is completely super crate box beside the point. The point is not whether the examinations can be set or sat for in our national tongue, but whether anyone who demands to write in Maltese because he cannot write English has successfully super crate box completed his tertiary education. And the answer to that question is an unequivocal no.
Arguments about the significance of the national tongue in respect of national identity have no place in this discussion. The issue here is whether you are equipped to perform all the work required super crate box to graduate from university if you speak and write only Maltese and pidgin English. With Maltese alone, or Maltese and some pidgin, you cannot do that. Whether this is wrong or right, fair or unfair, bad or good is by the by. It remains a fact of life, rather than a problem to solve.
Even the most fervent champions of Maltese cannot but admit even if it is only in private, not to lose face that knowing just Maltese restricts a person s educational and intellectual development so severely that it is safe to say one is left without any education except the most rudimentary. Even those champions acquired their own education in English, super crate box French or Italian.
Knowledge of English is now so poor among young Maltese – perhaps it has been so for generations, but it is becoming obvious now with so many trying super crate box to get into university and MCAST – that a serious rethinking of the school syllabus is called for. English is being taught as a known language, like Maltese, to secondary school children who would have a tough time learning it even in TEFL courses as a foreign language.
This is the root cause of our problem here: teenagers who have somehow managed to struggle through their Os, As and intermediates, in heaven alone knows what sort of English, are getting into university. Once there, they find they can t cope with the vastly more demanding standards of English required for reading tertiary-level papers and writing them.
So they put pressure on the authorities and politicians to allow them to write in Maltese. They would still be required to read English, because all the books and papers are in that language, but this appears to be of little concern to them. Reading, because of the general dumbing-down of the student quality, is now seen as an optional extra.
What we are talking about here is young people who cannot read, write or speak English, who have somehow managed to get into university, and who imagine that they can come out the other end three years later without reading a single book or paper and after answering some simple questions in Maltese.
It is shocking. Perhaps now the government super crate box will wake up to the fact that it has colluded in the creation of this linguistic monster, by giving undue importance to Maltese to the detriment of English, so handicapping yet another generation of children who haven t been lucky enough super crate box to learn the language at home.
Yes, I agree that it is silly and stupid to refuse to learn Maltese but it is even sillier and a

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