THE EXPERIMENT of running our education system by people’s committees, which was started by the previous government because the then education minister could not be bothered to take any decisions himself, has been zealously adopted by the People’s Republic.
Even our enlightened education minister, Andreas Demetriou, put aside his elitist mind-set, cultivated during decades of work in academia, to embrace the sacred principle of power to the people. And to prove that he was a man of the people, despite speaking proper Greek, he even revealed that he went to primary school in a village, the name of which escapes me.
The village-boy was given a roasting by deputies of the House education committee twice last week as well as by bash-patriotic newspaper columnists and teaching unions for his plans to promote a culture of reconciliation at our schools and to make Cyprus history text-books a bit less biased.
To get the patriotic mob off his back, Demetriou resorted to the ‘decision by committee’ ploy that always works. He told deputies at Tuesday’s education committee meeting that once the final draft of the new history text book was completed it would be presented to all social partners and their approval sought, before it was introduced to the schools.
After the late Pefkios’ revolutionary educational reform by public committee, we will now have the writing of Cyprus history by committee as well. At least with DIKO being involved, I am confident that Spy Kyp’s greatness will not be overlooked.
And with an authorial committee made up of enlightened and open-minded politicians, such as Koulias, Themistocleous and Varnavas, parents can rest assured that their kids will get a balanced and objective account of Turkish cruelty and barbarism.
HAVING got the politicians off his back, Demetriou then had to contend with equally bash-patriotic teachers, whose union bosses were moaning that they had not been consulted by the ministry before the objective of creating a culture of reconciliation and co-operation with the Turkish Cypriots had been set.
After a meeting on Thursday, the union issued a statement demanding discussions with the minister about his educational objectives. The teachers’ concern was that “the messages of peaceful co-existence and co-operation with the Turkish Cypriot community were promoted correctly, through the correct political messages against the occupation and the pseudo-state.”
While they agreed with the minister’s objectives, these should be cultivated in state education “with actions that showed up the harm that was and is being caused by the Turkish invasion.”
How they would do this, the statement did not explain but I suspect the last thing the teachers’ correct political messages would promote is reconciliation with the people who have benefited and are still benefiting from the invasion and occupation.
ON FRIDAY, Demetriou was back at the House, where he admitted that he had made a mistake in not consulting the teachers before announcing his noble objectives for the new school year. Presumably he would meet them soon so as to receive tips about how to promote the message correctly.
Decision-making by committee triumphs again. Demetriou appears to have given in to the teachers’ thinly-disguised blackmail. Their union had implied that the ministry’s reconciliation objectives would not be implemented if there were no discussions with the teachers.
Democratic education and people power are not just empty phrases in the People’s Republic – the uneducated masses decide how the education system would be reformed, fanatical politicians have a say about the contents of school history books and hard-line teachers dictate how the government would fail to promote reconciliation.
By next year, parents would probably be given the right to mark their kids’ exam papers as democracy is broadened.
DEMOCRATIC educational values were demonstrated in the mountain village of Kyperounda, where a number of parents objected to the longer day introduced at the local primary school. This was one of 15 schools island-wide at which the school day finishes at 4pm instead of 1pm.
From the first day of term, some 26 parents who objected to the 4pm scheme refused to take their kids to school, demanding that the shorter day was re-introduced. In the end the education minister visited the village to find a compromise.
He offered to provide a free bus service that would take the Kyperounda kids, whose parents wanted them to finish school at lunch-time, to a school in a neighbouring village at which the old time-table was operating. They pooh-poohed his suggestion insisting that their kids went to the village school and finished at 1pm.
And what did the democratic Demetriou do? According to Politis, he proposed to set up another department in the Kyperounda school which would have a different time-table and finish at 1pm in order to keep the 26 parents happy. But he asked that the arrangement be kept secret, presumably, so that parents would not make a similar demand for other all-day schools.
Demetriou may have a great intellect and an impressive academic career, but that is obviously no guarantee against him taking colossally stupid decisions, in the name of democracy of course.
SELF-RIGHTEOUS hacks and politicians spent most of Friday having a go at Mehmet Ali Talat for breaking the embargo on statements about the talks. Talat had given an interview to a Turkish TV channel after Thursday’s first round of negotiations and said a few general things about what had been discussed at the meeting.
This was a far cry from what the Denktator used to do during talks. As soon as he came out of the negotiating room he would make some inflammatory statements, designed to outrage the Greek Cypriots and poison the climate. Talat’s comments were nothing like that, but this did not stop our hacks from taking the moral high ground and making a big issue out of it.
I was particularly impressed with the look of moral superiority on the face of CyBC’s prim and proper Paris Potamitis when he was presenting Friday’s lunch-time chat show on TV. He kept coming back to the violation of the embargo, constantly encouraging his guests to talk about it.
This was the same TV hack who during the period before the referendum was only too happy to report bits of negatively spun information about the talks that were leaked to him by the Ethnarch’s poodles and were aimed at boosting opposition to the A-plan. The ethical Paris never protested, back then, that the news black-out on the talks was being systematically violated by his hero, Ethnarch Tassos.
PRIM and proper Paris was not the only hack to take the moral high plain about Talat’s violation of the embargo. Phil’s Kostas Venizelos, another recipient of Ethnarchic leaks during the A-plan talks, was also angered by the two-faced Turk’s tactics and said so in his report.
Of course, when you are on a high moral altitude, you might get a bit dizzy because of the lack of oxygen, and your brain stops operating properly. In the same report that the violation of the embargo was reported, Venizelos wrote plenty of details about what had been discussed at Thursday’s meeting between the two comrades, listing the respective positions of both sides and the arguments they advanced.
In fact his report revealed a lot more than Talat’s interview about what had been discussed at the first meeting, so it was a bit hypocritical to accuse Talat of breaking the embargo (even though he is the Turk) when someone else had done it as well. And as Venizelos is too patriotic to get his information from the Turkish side we can only assume that the embargo was broken by a member of Christofias’ team.
The hack tries to protect his source, in his trademark manner, by crediting his information to a “foreign diplomat, who knows what is happening in the talks”, but I would take that with a bucket of salt. In the past, Venizelos’ ‘foreign diplomat’, was usually Tasos Tzionis, but he is no longer involved in the talks.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if the new ‘foreign diplomat’ is a member of the Christofias team, which is sacredly adhering to the embargo.
WHAT A rip-off is all you can say about the ticket prices our clubs would be charging for their European football fixtures. You can understand Apoel and Omonia fleecing their fans for the home leg of their respective UEFA Cup ties, with ticket prices of €40 and €50 as they may not play a second tie in the competition.
But what is the excuse of Anorthosis, who have three home ties in the group stages of the Champions’ League? Participation in the group stages combined with TV money will earn the club about €6 million, so why are tickets for their home ties priced at €80 and €60? Is this how our champs will be thanking their fans for their loyal support over the years? Or are they imposing a surcharge for the enlightenment campaign that they will be carrying out about the Cyprus problem?
Strange how none of the price-watcher politicians, who are constantly moaning about high prices and want to make profiteering a criminal offence, have said anything about these rip-off prices. These are the most glaring cases of profiteering – 200% mark-ups on tickets – and the politicians who raise hell because the owner of a car park increases rates by 50 cents have not said a word.
SPEAKING of parking, there was great panic on Monday when it was announced that work would soon begin on the building of our new State Theatre on the grounds of the old GSP stadium in the centre of Nicosia. The old stadium was being used as a parking area by the civil servants who worked across the road at the finance ministry.
So where would our poor old civil servants park their cars when construction work began, the communications minister, who announced the government plan, was asked. Does anyone care? Do we really have nothing better to worry about than whether overpaid public parasites will not be able to park their cars right outside their offices? Surely they can park at the moat car park and walk or they can take the bus.
THE MINISTER of communications, Nicos Nicolaides, was not being funny when he suggested that the parasites could take the bus to work. He said he would create bus lanes from Strovolos so that the bus service would be become faster and more reliable. Then all the self-important finance ministry officials could go to work on the bus. Nicolaides must be living on another planet if he thinks something like a bus lane would work in Cyprus, a country in which everyone parks in the spaces reserved for the disabled and on pavements. How many drivers does he think would resist the temptation of using the bus lane when the other lane is choc-a-bloc with cars?
ARCHBISHOP Chrys made important revelations about the status of Church property in an interview published in last Sunday’s Phil.
“The property of the Church is not ours,” he said. “It belongs to the people and we must be good administrators (of these assets).” Was this just another one of his lies or was he being serious. As an owner of Church property, I would have expected to occasionally receive a cheque with dividends from my shares in Hellenic Bank, Keo etc, but it has never arrived.
Next weekend I will book into a Church-owned hotel and when I am checking out I will refuse to pay the bill on the grounds that I am one of its owners. And if the receptionist has a problem, I will tell him or her to call the Archbishop for confirmation.
CUSTOMERS of our establishment were taken by surprise when they saw a TV advert informing us that on Thursday night CyBC’s flagship political chat show, Proektasis, would be dedicated to the Big Bang experiment. Why was a scientific issue being discussed on a political show? Would there be an attempt to show that the Big Bang also caused the Cyprob? Or perhaps someone would argue that the efforts to find a settlement of the Cyprus problem pre-existed the Big Bang? We never found out because none of us watched the show.
TWO Turkish Cypriot cops were remanded in custody in the north for an offence and this was how our Public Information Office, reported the case: “The so-called court gave three days remand order pending further investigation for the two suspected so-called policemen.”
READERS may be interested to read a letter sent by lawyer Christos Clerides responding to last week’s comments about the case of the 35-year-old monk. Clerides took great exception to what had been written and has demanded a retraction, but has not told us exactly what he wanted the retraction to say. When he does we will be only too pleased to publish it. His response is published in the Letters page and it is worth a read.
