Category: education
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This Patchwork Life
Every day is multicultural! When we say “multicultural” our mind goes to the grand patchwork of society, a mixture of creeds, religions, nationalities, and so forth. Little do we appreciate that that is not the sole part of how much multi-culture affects our daily life. There is such a thing as microculture. We all know…
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Not for Employment but for Life
John Dewey once wrote that education and experience cannot be automatically equated to one another, and that is absolutely true to some extent. Education in itself is useful change that occurs in experience, the encounter with a different other (see Piaget and his theory of schemas). Non-useful change can be turned into useful if a…
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Weaponised Conceit and Gatekeeping in Education
I am not a petty person. Disorganised? A lot. Careless? Ask my wife. Loud, exuberant and opinionated? Is this blog not a clue? But petty? Not at all. I don’t think I have harboured any jealousy since I was a teenager, as ignorant as I was about how hard a life in a committed relationship…
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“Illum il-festa tagħna!”
Festa season and I have a…complicated relationship Don’t get me wrong; as I have stated before, I used to hate it but I have warmed up to the idea. There are many aspects of it that I have grown to appreciate; within the concept of the traditional Maltese Festa sit most of the best and…
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Woke Awoke
Time to roll your eyes, people. So many words are being thrown around willynilly like they mean something to divide people hither and thither. Titles, flags, oh Lord, make it stop. Sure it helps to identify people. But if only we stopped at that. I define myself as a socialist, among many other things. But…
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Sectoral Agreement Woes and Whoas
The meeting regarding the sectoral agreement for educators in Malta is fast approaching and my fellow educators and I have already started working ourselves up. Without a shadow of a doubt, a lot of the discourse started floating around wage raises and finances, and numbers of which I have so far made it absolutely clear…
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The Powerless Educator, part 2
A powerless educator is an unhappy and unhealthy educator. This is not to say that an educator should enjoy absolute freedom; that is a privilege that nobody in reality has or should have. There is freedom for, and freedom to, and a delicate balance in between that cannot realistically be broken without unfortunate consequences. But…
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A Step towards Self-Advocacy
It is no secret that most educators find themselves deluded by what unions they are offered. Having adopted a largely half-baked approach to protecting educators and education as a whole as discussed elsewhere, it is fairly obvious that we need a third alternative. I am not here to propose a third union. That would be…
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