Breaking them in : schooling for work in Malta

Abstract

There is a substantial amount of research that shows the linkages that exist between the world of formal education and that of work. Various scholars using different theoretical perspectives have argued, for instance, that schools orient students for the world of work by teaching them about it through the formal curriculum and by socialising them into its norms and values through the hidden or informal curriculum. Schools, it has been pointed out, also prepare students directly for the world of work by equipping them with skills that are necessary for the functioning of industry, whether such skills are linguistic, social, cultural, and/or technical. It has also been argued that schools help industrialists, entrepreneurs and state bureaucracies by furnishing graduates with credentials and certificates, which in effect are messages about the abilities and worth of individual students who apply for employment in the labour market.

These four key bonds between education and the world of work - orientation, socialisation, preparation, and selection - have been problematised because they fail both the test of efficiency and of equity (see Watts, 1985). Schools, for instance, are often accused by industrialist and employers of being too detached from the 'real world', and they therefore cannot effectively represent the realities of work to students (see Sultana, this volume). Schools as institutions are notoriously ineffecient in passing on the technical skills required by industry, with the latter seeming much more able to identify which skills are in demand, and to teach these skills in a shorter, more cost effective manner than formal educational institutions do (Psacharopoulous, 1987, 1991; Sultana, 1992). On their part, credentialling systems have too often developed a logic of their own, responding to educational rather than industrial imperatives, so that employers either misinterpret or very simply ignore the messages that are supposedly given by certificates (Maguire and Ashton, 1981; Zahra and Ebejer , 1992; Baldacchino, 1995; Sultana, this volume). Education systems have also been severely criticised not only for failing to effectively respond to the needs of industry, but also for responding in such a way as to benefit particular views of the world - as well as groups of students - over others. School curricula, for instance, have been found to be insufficiently critical of the world of work, presenting it to students as it is rather than as it could and should be (Althusser, 1972; Apple, 1990; Sultana, 1987; Simon et al., 1991). Not only do schools tend to teach for, rather than about work, but they also discriminate between different groups of students, so that some - those coming from elite and privileged class backgrounds - are taught about, and socialised for, managerial and professional careers, while others - generally those coming from working class backgrounds - are oriented and prepared instead for the bottom rungs of a segmented labour market (Bowles and Ginits, 1976; Anyon, 1980; Sultana, 1992). Credentialling also seems to work in favour of the same groups, and has been portrayed as a mechanism that ensures that cultural capital circulates among, and is reproduced within homogenous class groupings, so that it can then be transformed into economic capital on the employment market (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977).

One can of course imagine other kinds of problematic relationships between the world of schooling and that of industry. With the rise of mass youth unemployment in the late seventies, for instance, schools have been depicted as 'holding pens' to keep young people off the streets, thus fulfilling an important if indirect economic function by easing the demographic pressure on a labour market unable to compete with the demand for employment (Bates et al., 1984). At another level, it has been increasingly fashionable to suggest that while industry has made a transition to a post-fordist world - where flexibility, high skills levels, creativity, team work and so on are valued - schools still look back to an industrial fordist past, valuing discipline, order, specialisation, and individual competitivity (Brown and Lauder, 1991). The relationship between education and the world of work is not only complex and problematic, but has also proved to be a central concern for many governments, as these have tended to look towards schooling in order to redress ailing economies. This is particularly true for countries such as Malta, where the only available resources are human resources, and where therefore the political rhetoric has highlighted the crucial role that education has to play in the development of the nation. The fact that in Malta the education portfolio had in 1992 been re-designated as the Ministry of Education and Human Resources is only one of the more visible if superficial signs of a historically and deeply engrained approach to the challenge of economic well-being. In this chapter, we will address a number of the central concerns that have been identified in the necessarily brief overview of the inter-phase between education and the economy. More particularly, we will focus on the way that Maltese schools orient students for the workplace through both the hidden and the formal curriculum, investigating the extent to which schools are implicated in the reproduction or/and transformation of a labour market that is segmented along class and gender lines.