Technical and vocational education in 19th century Malta

Abstract

One of the key areas of interest in educational history is the development of curricular disciplines, and how ‘subjects’ come to be included in the formal programme of what is taught in schools. Curriculum history highlights the struggles around the definition of which knowledge is legitimate and worthwhile, as well as where knowledge ‘boundaries’ are drawn and why. It therefore reflects the relative power of different status groups in society at a particular point in time to establish their agendas and to promote their vision of how a ‘good education’ is to be defined. Each ‘subject’ has its own specific history; here the focus is on technical and vocational education, and how this struggled for legitimacy throughout the 19th century in Malta, when the island was a British colony. This article is part of a larger, on-going project that has, as its aim, the historical and sociological exploration of the development of vocational and technical education in colonial and post-colonial Malta. A key concern that informs both the historical and sociological accounts is the way different curricular diets have been provided in a way that creates or reinforces social stratification. This particular article looks at the initial, largely unsuccessful attempts to graft a technical/ vocational element in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions in the 19th century. Developments since then—including the setting up of the first state technical school, and the gradual acceptance of the idea that form of technological literacy should become part of the compulsory diet of every student—are dealt with in other publications. In organising and giving form to the historical data presented below, I have decided to provide a chronological account, using a crude though not totally arbitrary method of slicing through historical development at regular intervals. That slicing of decades is generally related to major events, often the publication of an influential educational report, or the reform of the educational system. This method satisfies my goal of presenting reasonably detailed discussion of data, while at the same time incorporating most of the periods in which the issue of vocational and technical education attained significant levels of national importance. In writing this historical account one problem emerges above all others, namely that, given the nature of the main sources I have followed—books, pamphlets, and leaflets on education, government department reports, texts of public speeches, biographical accounts of key political figures, newspaper reports—“the main vocabulary and structure of analysis…have been defined from the top, and the most persistent controversies have been sustained by interpreta tion and reinterpretation of definitions from the top”. In the 19th century, seeing events ‘from the top’, also meant privileging the male voice, so that a history of technical education is predominantly a history of male education. As in many other areas of life, women remain hidden from ‘his/story’ either because the home was considered to be their proper place, or because, given that fact, any ‘vocational’ education revolved around providing the skills re quired solely to service the needs of a husband and family, rather than those of an economy in dire need of development.