On a hard rock : trying to be radical in a conservative context

Abstract

My title is an adaptation of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent address to Malta, where he referred to St Paul’s (supposed) shipwreck on Malta. The Acts he quotes ‘Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island’ (Acts 27, 26) construct the running aground on Malta as a blessing for those shipwrecked. I introduce myself as a 55 year old Maltese woman; a person who feels that she is often stuck by being on this small island in the Mediterranean, at the same time as recognising that without it, she would be drowning. It has provided a raison d’être for my work, my social and political commitments and my most lasting affective relationships. As a teacher educator I am one of many. As a sociologist of education, I am one of a very small group. Where some have taken a more social theoretical approach and others a more global or international direction of late, I have tried to contribute by doing detailed, often tedious, empirical work on Maltese education policy and practice, which I hope will someday inform Maltese education policy making, or at least, to paraphrase Brecht, make those in power sleep less well. In the 1970s I persuaded my father to part-fund a Masters degree at the University of Essex instead of a wedding (which I subsequently never had despite a marriage). This taught course in the Sociology of Literature allowed me to eventually make a move toward sociology of education, not through a teacher training route—which at that time in Malta was only available in Catholic training colleges—but through a more theoretical and critical path. Though I now regret not having had teacher training, I do not think I would have developed the perspective on education I have, had I gone through that route at the time. I returned to Malta in 1978 in the middle of social and political turmoil where a legitimately elected Labour government was being severely obstructed in its modernising project by more conservative professional groups and their organisations. The University was one such site of struggle. Through teaching literature to Faculty of Education students in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I became more and more aware of education as a key element in a political project that sought a more egalitarian society for Malta. I chose to apply for a Ph.D. in the sociology of education, and benefitted from an Academic Staff Commonwealth scholarship in this. Given that mine was the first school and classroom ethnography in Malta, which included also some historical work, I was able on my return from Cardiff, to introduce a number of new courses in the Faculty of Education programme. These included courses on the history of education, cultures of schools and classrooms, and gender education, all new at the time During the 1970s and early 80s I was an active member of a small feminist group Min-Naha tan-Nisa [On the part/side of women] (many of whose members, including myself, still meet today as the Women’s Studies Group) which was successful in getting government to open family planning clinics in Malta’s health centres, and other women’s rights issues on the policy agenda. We also campaigned in favour of a divorce law; a Draft was produced but not passed in Parliament. Malta remains one of two countries without divorce law to date. I have worked on gender consistently since, looking at gender and subject choice, the labour market, vocational guidance, adult education, and Malta’s gender equality strategies. I was disappointed when, as Consultant to the Parliamentary Secretary for Women’s Rights (1996–1998), my proposal to set up a Research and Documentation Centre within the Secretariat for Women’s Rights was derailed by a change of government. Also disappointing is that the work I did as a member of the National Minimum Curriculum Gender Focus Group, including drafting Gender Equity Guidelines for Schools, has not been implemented in schools. It was a breakthrough when in the early 1990s, despite my open collapsed Catholicism, not to say ‘non-practising atheism’ (a felicitous turn of phrase I owe to my colleague Professor Yosanne Vella), and feminism, I was invited by the Archbishops’ Seminary to address seminarians about the ‘women question’, as they put it. There are some minor successes in being a public intellectual. Following the Sunday paper publication of an article I had written ‘Before schools break up’ (The Sunday Times, 17th July 1994) I was invited to meet the Minister of Education. As I reflect on the episode, I can see that Malta’s smallness, where one can trace more easily the capillary sources of power, has always led me to consider vital the space of agency in social action, a corrective to overly determinist perspectives which I entertained for a short period, without at the same time being voluntaristic in my analysis of social relations. In my case, I had criticised the managerial and New Right direction then being adopted which transformed the Education Department from a professional bureaucracy to a managerial one through an ‘Operations Review’. The Minister, to his credit, given my open opposition to his party in government, invited me to outline how he could balance the managerial approach to policy making with a professional perspective. I am sure he had other advisors; however, within a few months he set up an Advisory Committee on which I sat as member, and which produced the Tomorrow’s Schools (Consultative Committee on Education, 1996) vision for Malta, which has remained an important document to date. Recently I was awarded of the Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge Fellowship which I held at University College Dublin in 2007; I also received an invitation to sit on the International Benchmarking Review Panel of UK Sociology (2009).