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A young woman had to die before excessive drinking among our young people appeared again on our national agenda. There is now talk of making alcohol drinking illegal for under 18s, regulating open bars and carrying out breathalyser tests more regularly. But are these steps enough to address the serious problem of excessive drinking among our teenagers?
Alcohol drinking is already illegal for minors under 16 years of age. Yet many of them drink heavily. So simply pushing the age limit up to 18 will not solve the problem. It will simply mean that more young people will be breaking the law. The present law is already not being enforced adequately. A stricter future law will be enforced less… unless there is the political will to enforce. The same goes for breathalyser tests and for taking steps against tampering with drinks in open bar parties.
I am all for changing the laws, as long as these changes are not cosmetic and simply serve to make us feel good that and give the impression that we are doing something about excessive drinking by our young people.
As parents, educators, politicians, church, business, union and other community leaders, we should be worried at the heavy drinking that our young people indulge in, and not just to celebrate the start of a new year, but also on many other days throughout the year. We have created a moral and cultural wilderness for our young people. We drive them crazy to study hard and pass as many exams as possible but our schooling is so narrow and culturally impoverished that only a few young “nerds” attend theatres, concerts, art galleries and participate in sports. Many of our young people escape from their stress at the weekend by drowning themselves in heavy drinking and idiotic entertainment.
In the so called “park” in St Julians, especially on Saturday, groups of young people meet to drink wine, whisky and vodka bought from nearby shops and poured out of glass bottles into plastic ones. They then move on to Paceville to continue drinking heavily and behaving stupidly. We have failed to provide our young people with other alternatives for their leisure and entertainment.
Since 1995 the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs (ESPAD) has been showing us that our young people of secondary school age are among the heaviest alcohol drinkers in Europe. We share this dubious primacy with Northern European countries like Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. We are the only Southern European country where young people indulge in heavy binge drinking of alcohol.
The 2003 ESPAD survey shows that our young people are drinking even more heavily than they did in 1995. The 2003 survey puts us in top place in Europe among young people drinking spirits, wine and beer. The same survey warns that students, who start drinking heavily in their early teens, become dependent on alcohol when they are still young and are very likely to grow into serious problem drinkers in the future. Countries like Malta whose citizens have alcohol related problems face higher social and health costs. This is certainly not the way to build a richer, fairer Malta.
The serious problem of heavy alcohol drinking among our youth must not be seen in isolation and tackled only as a law enforcement issue. Government must take an integrated approach to address the issue and involve also the education, health and welfare ministries. Government must also work hand in hand with business and union organisations and with civil society. We need a systemic and comprehensive approach to solve this serious problem. We need a serious strategy in schools and beyond them.
Peter Mayo
Peter thinks that adult education “still remains the ‘Cinderella’ sector of the Maltese educational system.” He complains that a draft document outlining a National Strategy for Lifelong Learning – completed a couple of years back – and meant to generate a public debate, has not been circulated. “I wonder why. Has the country’s financial situation anything to do with this? Alas, there have been lots of promises and noise in the way of promoting adult education within the context of lifelong learning but little take off.”
Peter welcomes the EU’s Grundtvig action within Socrates and the Leonardo programme as lots of people are being attracted to the field but warns “unless they are particularly creative, these people will not add anything new to the theory and practice of adult education in Malta and Gozo and, worse, as far as the EU projects are concerned, some of them would fail to deliver.”
Peter would like to see local councils play a prominent part in the development of schools as centres for lifelong learning and in the fostering of a community education culture. He suggests that the budget for local councils “be increased with a substantial amount to be reserved for educational programmes. These programmes would include a viable and attractive community library, on the lines of the one opened at Fgura, and an IT centre, the latter intended to serve as a means to bridge the ‘digital divide.’ We need to ensure that a cadre of trained people is provided in the area of Educating Older Adults so that they can be employed at old people’s homes to ensure that these homes, which are mushrooming in view of the requirements of an aging population, become hives of activity that can have a salutary effect on the lives of their residents who would thus be viewed as active and not passive beings.”
Peter thinks that adult education has an important role to play in immigration. The present detention centres should be transformed into Immigrant Lifelong Learning Centres, with due focus on education for resettlement. The potentially receiving country should help in the financing and provision of resources for programmes at the centres that will equip migrants with the linguistic and other skills necessary for them to relocate.”
He also thinks that intensive, short in-service programmes in intercultural education should be provided to those sectors of Maltese society dealing with immigrants, including members of the police force, the army, the entertainment industry, the teaching profession, the broadcasting media and the judicial sector. “I would like to see such an educational programme, comprising a strong anti-racist education component, become a feature of all sectors of the educational system, from initial to university education, and include continuous professional development courses in various fields, given the appalling racism and xenophobia we are witnessing at present.”
Peter also recommends turning museums into lifelong education centres. Heritage Malta and the University should develop a postgraduate diploma course in museum education to prepare a cadre of people who can serve as museum educators.
Peter would like to see “greater importance being attached to the preparation of adult educators. Pedagogy has all too often been taken for granted as far as adult education is concerned. Some people are very creative and develop innovative pedagogical approaches. Others simply replicate with adult approaches normally used with school children. I would also like to see greater recognition of learning occurring through non- formal means and I think the country needs to invest more in the development of expertise in such areas as Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition. We also need to engage with this area critically and ensure that what is valued through this exercise is not simply competence-based learning but an array of other types of learning.”
Turning to education-business links, Peter points out that “in micro-states like ours, the state must shoulder a substantial part of the vocational preparation of adults in that small companies do not enjoy the necessary ‘economies of scale’ to render in-house training a viable option. Under the impact of globalisation we must channel our efforts in preparing adults, through adult education programmes, for those ‘quality’ jobs that are knowledge-based.”
However he is worried that the dominant discourse regarding adult education worldwide centres around the economy. “This discourse is often neo-liberal in nature and seems to project the notion of the learner and citizen as ‘producer’ and ‘consumer.’ It neglects a larger though repressed tradition of adult education that emphasises the role of the citizen as social actor, and the role of adult learning as a vital activity within social movements, including labour movements. Furthermore, an increase in investment in adult education or all education for that matter, with economic returns in mind, without a corresponding reciprocal investment in the economic sector, perpetuates, and probably exacerbates, the situation of ‘education for export’ that has been a characteristic of colonial and neo-colonial policies to date.”
Peter laments that we do not have a strong progressive social movement culture that promotes the idea of adult education for social transformation, an ongoing process that entails a constant engagement in the struggle for social justice and for confronting and disrupting the status quo. But he adds: “Luckily, there are resources of hope. Groups such as those concerned with ‘justice in trade’ and biodiversity show us the way forward in this regard.”
evaristbartolo@hotmail.com
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