Social class and educational achievement in Malta

Abstract

The promise that education holds out for many parents is that through a sustained effort and investment in school work on the part of their children, these can hope for a better quality of life than they themselves had. One of the predominant concerns of educational theory and research in the last four decades has been that schooling, rather than bringing about social equality and equity, serves to reproduce privilege from one generation to the next. This problem was also brought up at a political level when in the 1950s and 1960s in such countries as the USA, the UK, Sweden and Australia the prevalent belief was that schools and education could bring about an open society where effort and ability rather than accidents of birth would determine one's occupational future. Citizens would therefore move upwards or downwards socially according to their success at school rather than because of inherited privilege. It was for this reason that in those countries by the 1960s - and in Malta in the 1970s - schools were restructured through the introduction of comprehensivization and the removal of streaming and tracking to enhance an 'open' school system.