Preface : Malta’s educational history : past, present – what future?

Abstract

The Preface to the first edition of this volume, published in 2001, started off with the declaration that the collection of readings was “largely motivated by a concern that tomorrow’s teachers have little knowledge or understanding of – let alone passion for or even curiosity about – history”. I then went on to note that this was not so much a criticism of teachers themselves, as of the educational institutions they have inhabited – be it schools (where their encounter with history is often brief and superficial), or university (where, in the Faculty of Education, no teaching or research post exists in the area, even if some members of staff provide historical perspectives on educational development in a number of study units). The situation has changed little since then. Despite the commendable efforts of the members of the History Teachers’ Association, both to carve more space for the subject in the curriculum, and to ensure its effective teaching, history remains a minor area of optional study in the political economy of the curriculum. It would therefore be fair to claim that the majority of Malta’s teachers graduate and move into schools and classrooms without much appreciation at all of the way they differ from – or are uncannily similar to – teachers a century and a half ago in the manner they teach, in the curriculum they manage, in the educational theories and assumptions they work with, in the views they hold of the learner, and so on. More importantly, they will have had little opportunity to develop that which, from the perspective of a social scientist, is so vital in the formation of any intellectual: a historical imagination. Two important issues need to be highlighted here, for both underpin the rationale that led to the putting together of this volume. First is the conviction that teachers are – or, at any rate, are called to be – ‘intellectuals’. They are expected to be producers of meaning, and not merely transmitters of knowledge. As such they – we – have to have the tools to de-code the complex world in which we all live, provided, that is, that the search for ‘enlightenment’, wisdom and virtue is still a meaningful pursuit in this ‘post-truth age’, and that it has not been rendered completely meaningless by the diploma disease that would equate university degrees with a career tout court. Among these tools is history, which not only puts at our disposal versions of ‘the’ past (in the rather optimistic hope that hindsight leads to wisdom, and that historical knowledge shakes up prejudices, enlarges horizons, provides perspective, and sheds light on the origins of present problems or the environment in which such problems have to be resolved), but is a most powerful antidote against ‘reification’, an ugly word which signals an equally ugly reality – namely, when human affairs are perceived in such a way that they assume a fixedness that removes them from the realm of the will. Or, to put this second conviction more simply, a historical imagination helps us remember that we are who we are, and social institutions are what they are, because they were so created in time and space by other human beings, engaged as these were in making sense of their existence, as well as in the pursuit of their own interests. Decisions made, options taken or ignored, battles fought in the field or secret chambers of power, not to mention the vicissitudes of life – one and all and more led to social forms that congealed to reflect the balance of force at a particular historical conjuncture. A sense of the profound historicity of institutions, practices, categories of thought, and so on is vital not only because that sort of ennobling and at the same time humbling knowledge is necessary if we are to feel part of the journey of humanity through its mis/adventures, but more importantly, because it strengthens our understanding of the fact that we can make history, even if under conditions not of our own making. We are subjects of history, not merely its objects. From this perspective, then, the history of education is not “an indigestible mass of dates and facts, orders and Acts” – a necessary if somewhat tedious element in the baggage of the ‘cultured’ educator and the ‘professional’ teacher – the ‘icing on the cake’, as a colleague once remarked about my attempt to consider an educational phenomenon – vocational schooling – both sociologically and historically. Nor is the study of the history of education divorced from the study of the history of society more generally, given that the way we have ‘schooled’ generations over time reflects social norms, expectations, organisational forms, and the definition and distribution of power more generally. Rather, the kind of educational history that I have in mind is one that is part and parcel of the analysis of a social formation at all its levels, in a salutary exercise of interdisciplinarity where the different fields of the social sciences – such as economics, sociology, anthropology, politics, and cultural studies – are dynamically and organically engaged in order to more effectively reflect upon and understand the nature of human action over time.