No meaning outside time

The main points raised by Desmond Zammit Marmarà in his article Post-Secondary Educa­tion (Dec­ember 29) deserve to be strongly commended, supported and acted upon.

The very mention of history as a discipline is disappearing in favour of a curricular mish-mash- Henry Frendo

Is he not completely right to lament the fact that students today often do not have as much as “a rudimentary knowledge of Maltese history and culture”? “I think it is simply pathetic,” Mr Zammit Marmarà wrote, “to ask a youth of 17 about the British period in Malta and find out that he does not even know when it started and when it came to an end. Even the ordinary (wo)man in the street should know this!”

As the senior professor of history at Malta and the author of some 30 books about different aspects of it over the past 42 years, I would like to ask: whose fault is this?

If our pupils and students are not (or are no longer) taught Maltese history at school as an integral part of the curriculum, how should we expect them to know it? Is it their fault, or is someone or something else to blame for this admittedly pathetic state of affairs, in a young, small, independent nation-state?

I undertook to carry forward the late Professor Andrew Vella’s Storja ta’ Malta’s first two volumes and was pleased when my volume 3 (Żmien l-Ingliżi: Is-Seklu Dsatax, KKM, 2004) was awarded the tender, through the Education Ministry, as a secondary school text book. In its launch, the Shadow Minister for Education, Evarist Bartolo, described it as a very weighty work (“Dan ktieb ta’ qawwa kbira”).

I had been advised by the then Minister of Education (Louis Galea) to write in Maltese as our students were more likely to understand this than English. So I did, although a number of private schools apparently shun the book for that reason. Worse still, I understand that the Ministry only purchased 200 copies of the book supposedly to cater for the upper forms of all secondary schools – that is primarily for those students who made bold to choose history as ‘an option’, if and when the school concerned could offer it even as such.

The situation today is worse as the very mention of history as a discipline is disappearing in favour of a curricular mish-mash.

Still, as I have had an ongoing positive feedback from teachers and students who do use the book in their teaching and learning, I am embarking on a second volume of Żmien l-Ingliżi to cover the 20th century (i.e. vol. 4 of this first ever general history of Malta in Maltese). However, it is an uphill climb because the obstacles are no less linguistic and pedagogical than they are socio-cultural.

Teaching one how to teach need not really make a teacher unless one has first internalised the subject being taught, and can thus convey evolving happenings, patterns and postures convincingly, passionately, hopefully in a receptive ambience.

Having taught in various overseas universities, I can dearly sympathise with Mr Zammit Marmarà’s analysis concerning the lack of “a critical approach to learning” among Maltese post-secondary students.

“As a teacher,” he writes, “I am delighted when a student challenges an assertion which I have made during the course of my explanation. This usually leads to a class discussion which, ultimately, is the most effective way to teach and to learn. Unfortunately, however, on some occasions one asks the class for comments or a reaction to the teacher’s introductory explanation and is faced with a row of blank faces. A number of students seem to find it very hard to give their own opinion.”

Again, however, this begs the question. Is it because not enough space is given to the voices of students, although “we have started moving away from an examination-centred educational system”. Is that the reason for the silence? Or is it, perhaps, that students – like the Maltese in general – tend to be lazy readers and passive listeners, unless provoked into action and forced to be pro-active, to do or say something specifically? At a tertiary level, that could comprise guided presentations, experiments, theses; or other minor projects such as have indeed started to be assigned in secondary schools.

On New Year’s Eve, an English lady married to an esteemed Maltese gentleman told me how much she enjoys listening in to Campus FM for the series L-Ewropa u l-Imperu, based on my recent volume Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean, which Charles Xuereb presents on Thursday and Saturday mornings. And how much she had learnt from it. She understood Maltese but (like so many others) “unfortunately I find difficulty reading it”. This book, however, is in English. We are only using Maltese as a spoken medium to dissect it chapter by chapter. The confusion between the spoken and the written parallels that between the administrative and the academic.

When I write in Maltese, I am asked why I did not write in English. And when I write in English, I am asked why I did not write in Maltese. Whoever said there was no longer a ‘language question’ in Malta, if that is what it is – or indeed if that is all what it has ever been at any given time. So life is not easy for a didactically-driven Maltese author who strives to write comprehensively and tolerantly about non-linguistic, non-literary subjects in the vernacular. It is mainly the language itself that has an obligatory niche market of sorts. Nor, clearly, is it easy for those wishing to learn and to teach, further stimulated by knowledge acquisition through reading – as opposed to soaking in ready-made sermons or power-point presentations, however helpful these may be.

All that includes learning about how the past came to us, how it was played out, and what it has meant and means. Engagingly. Contextually. Comparatively. Inter-actively. Discursively. Hence, as rightly noted, the importance of class discussions. I sometimes wonder if the prevalence of blasphemy and loudness in Maltese society may not be put down partly to a want of vocabulary, a non-education in basic discourse.

I am not conversant with “big bang” theory and suchlike but, theology apart, I have a vivid impression of the Julie Andrews song in The Sound of Music: Nothing Comes from Nothing.

I recall the late Rev. Prof. Peter Serracino Inglott during a first-year philosophy lesson describing lecture notes as “notes which pass on from the lecturer’s notebook to the student’s notebook without passing through the mind of either”.

Cicero once said that a people without history remain locked in the mentality of an infant who knows neither whence he came nor whither he will go.

The best-selling contemporary historian Simon Shama puts it in another way. “To know our past is to grow up.” Well?

Henry Frendo is director of the Institute of Maltese Studies at the University of Malta.