Gender, ethnicity and education in Malta

Abstract

In the national report it prepared for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), the Maltese Commission for the Advancement of Women wrote that the main objective of the Maltese state is to promote education and instruction and to ensure the existence of a system of schools and institutions accessible to all Maltese citizens catering for the full development of the whole personality including the ability of every person to work (Commission, 1994, 32). In the Maltese Islands, legal and institutional impediments have been legislatively removed, so to say, to enable equal access to educational resources. Wrench (1992), however, points out that practices which might be perceived as equal in their application often turn out to be discriminatory in their effect. My objective in this paper is to find out how educational practices might be discriminatory, for whom and on what basis, within the Maltese Islands. My main concern is in finding out how girls and women, as well as individuals deriving from the Gozitan ethnic group, are faring within the Maltese educational system. My objective in analyzing Maltese educational policies and practices is to render visible those ideological conditions which both stimulate and legitimize discriminatory practices (Essed, 1991, 166).