Post-commentary. Southern European/Mediterranean contributions to sociology of education

Abstract

In this piece I shall provide some reflections on Sociology of Education from a southern perspective, concentrating, for the most part, on Southern Europe/the Mediterranean. I will focus on these key issues: rhythms of life and congenial educational systems, Southern European/Mediterranean contributions to learning, knowledge and social science, and the key issue of environmental sustainability and migration, the last two being quite intertwined. This region has been under the influence of Northern colonialism and subject to influences in Education coming from the North. Of course countries such as Italy have had influences, in both provision (especially its much lauded early childhood education) and critique, emerging from within the country itself, namely the Emilia Romagna experiments with regard to Early Childhood Education, the work of important practitioners such as Danilo Dolci regarding community learning and action and Aldo Capitini, regarding grassroots democracy, and don Lorenzo Milani and the students at Barbiana with respect to critique (and also provision of alternatives to) of the bourgeois oriented public school system. Other countries in the region have also produced their own forms of critique and educational possibilities but many, such as the one I come from (Malta), have imported models from colonial centres, either Paris or London. Moreover, many countries on the Northern side of the Mediterranean and also Portugal are subject to educational directives emerging from an institution, the EU, which has been criticised for being Northern and Western dominated imposing systems more suited to the climate and mode of living of the North and Central Europe than of the South whose traditional rhythms of life are more suited to certain climate conditions described as sub-tropical. Discussing education in the context of climatic conditioning of ‘rhythms of life’ is a key theme missing from most conventional sociology of education, alas including critical sociology of education discourses. One key source of influence here would be the French annales historian Ferdinand Braudel (1972) and his relating climate and vegetation to specific rhythms of life throughout the Mediterranean region (p. 236), a historian whose works have had little influence on sociology of education writings thus far save for work specifically focusing on the Mediterranean (Sultana, 1995). [excerpt].