Malta’s ‘Sputnik’ moment of education

In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama, as eloquent as ever, declared the new generation of American citizens were entering a “Sputnik moment”, recalling the launch of the first-ever satellite, the Soviet Sputnik in October 1957.

This unexpected Russian technological breakthrough had rocked America to its foundation causing the immediate overhaul of its educational system by investing heavily in the “gifted child” and introducing a new approach to the study of science and mathematics. Education was deeply affected and the immediate response on science and maths propelled America to put man on the moon 10 years later.

Coming at a time when Malta is in the process of overhauling its state educational system, Mr Obama’s “Sputnik moment” has a great significance and relevance with regard to our island, not least in our educational thought and practice.

Mr Obama delivered his message in the wake of the visit to Washington of Chinese President Hu Jintao, bearing in mind China and India were challenging the US for economic supremacy. He openly declared these economic battles will be fought in the classroom, revealing these emerging industrial giants “started educating their children earlier and longer with greater emphasis on science and maths”. The US President promised he would be putting money into biotechnology, IT and clean energy while insisting the real investment would be in better research and education.

With Malta’s education at the crossroads in this crucial moment in time, I would like to focus on three local major issues that, somehow, relate to Mr Obama’s clarion call, namely, the gifted child, the mastery of the English language as a vehicle for research and the teaching of science at an early age.

Recent initiatives in state schools signal a positive wind of change in the corridors of power. For example, the programme to deploy specialists to combat illiteracy is a step in the right direction. It is a cardinal principle in educational philosophy that all children should be given equal opportunity to succeed. However, at this “Sputnik moment” it is well to recall that after the launch of the first Soviet Sputnik in 1957 it became increasingly realised in many advanced countries that the slogan “equal opportunities for all” is not synonymous with “equal education for all” because every child should be given the opportunity to excel and to extend him/herself.

Just as we give special attention to the “backward child” (and rightly so), the gifted child is also deserving of special attention. If not, we run the risk of depriving the child who is very clever, has the aptitude and ability and who is destined to become a leader in his particular field of expressing his/her full potential by bringing him/her down to the level of his/her companion, who, although equally deserving of our attention, would never achieve in a lifetime of effort what the exceptional gifted child could do.

The nation would suffer from this egalitarian heresy. Fortunately, our new system has introduced “benchmarking”, also known as “key stage testing”, which has the advantage of identifying high flyers at the primary stage in the pious hope they do not become “needles in a haystack” in the secondary stage. Strangely enough, it was the Soviet Union itself, based on supposedly egalitarian principles, that held highly competitive “academics’ Olympics” in order to recruit the best brains at an early age.

According to recent reports, many EU regions are now heavily committed to a system of education based on the old values of class teaching as opposed to continuous group teaching, with an emphasis on the core curriculum subjects of maths, science and English.

This brings me to my next point, the importance of the English language in the local situation. To us, this universal language is not simply a vestige of our erstwhile colonial masters but an indispensable vehicle of educational, economic, technical and cultural import. It is this degree of necessity that gives meaning to the term “English as a second language” in contrast to the more leisurely approach we give to German, Italian, French or Spanish, which, though highly desirable, we still consider as foreign languages.

Unfortunately, in many primary schools the disproportionate attention given to other subjects at the expense of English is very disturbing. Hopefully, with the elimination of the Junior Lyceum examination, which included Maltese, social studies and religion, more attention is given to the teaching of English. Mr Obama’s insistence on more research brings to the fore the stark reality that, at times, we have reluctantly to accept the predominance of English over our mother tongue dictated by the fact that research possibilities in the vernacular are sadly very limited. Furthermore, in this day and age, English (not Britannia) has the added advantage of ruling the e-waves.

In the post-Sputnik era of the 1960s, science became a global obsession. The consequences of this burgeoning interest in science caused many advanced countries to change their attitudes and focus on that subject to the extent that it was introduced as a core curriculum subject in primary schools.

Understandably, the teaching of science at primary level in many EU countries was introduced after various lengthy pilot projects and is presently conducted through a discovery approach to learning, (akin to the old “nature study” subject), the idea being to create learning situations in which children use familiar situations and experiences. As many countries have also included “science” in their key stage testing at primary level, it would be interesting to know to what extent science teaching has been included in our primary schools.