Introduction

Abstract

This book began as a response to a felt need among students following teacher training courses for a set of readings in the sociology of education that reflected the Maltese context and the realities ofthe island's schools. Some of the most fundamental sociological insights developed with reference to education systems in industrially advanced countries such as England, France, Germany and the U.S.A. do, of course, contribute to an understanding of schooling in Malta, and to its relationship with wider society. The island, however, has its own specific character, one marked by scale, late industrial- and educational - development, and its own particular history of dependency, an interplay and struggle between foreign and local power structures and hierarchies. This book sets out to address that specificity, drawing on several theoretical frameworks in critical sociology of education in order to analyse, interpret and problematise current educational practice in Malta.