Louis Galea’s speech on the 30th anniversary of George Borg Olivier’s death aroused much discussion among the audience at Castille, but has not received a similar reception in the media. What was your own reaction?
I agreed with the person sitting next to me in the second row: “Galea in Luxembourg has obviously had the leisure to read a lot and to reflect even more deeply not only on his long experience begun under Borg Olivier of Maltese political history but also on the future prospects of our island in the European and the global context.
He made this question the guiding theme of his talk: Borg Olivier’s name has become synonymous with winning Independence (meaning sovereignty as a nation’s state) for Malta, but hasn’t globalisation made nation-state sovereignty obsolete? The recent world crisis has shown to what extent independent action even by the largest states is limited. Was Borg Olivier’s achievement for Malta therefore just a brief illusion?
Galea’s answer was: the paraphernalia of statehood have indeed come to count for little, but that on the contrary the flourishing of the cultural identity of a people, which was the real goal of Borg Olivier’s endeavours and for which nation-state sovereignty was only necessary infrastructure endures.
An identifiable flourishing culture is the key to survival and prosperity in the knowledge economy that has emerged together with globalisation, notwithstanding how ill managed it has been at least until now.
This was because the knowledge economy (and Galea kept asking how clearly an understanding most of us had of this concept, and of its relatedness to the different concept of a knowledge society) was based on two fundamental factors. The first was innovation, which depended on a flourishing identifiable culture. The second was community participation in the creative societal fermentation within which innovation arose.
Does this pattern of thought somehow reflect the phases of Galea’s life work moving from social policy to education, the ministry over which he presided longest?
In his speech Galea began by acknowledging Borg Olivier’s not often fully appreciated achievements in education. In the style of a documentary historian, he brought out clearly the two-pronged structure of the educational policy followed throughout the Borg Olivier years. The first aimed at inclusiveness, by which is meant not only provision for the disabled but also more generally concern that there should be as few dropouts as possible.
The second thrust was technology. The PN electoral programme had already promised to set up a Polytechnic in the fifties, although the promise could only be carried out after the interval of the first Mintoff government bent on integration.
A whole panoply of technical institutes and other spurs aimed deliberately and systematically at producing a cultural revolution that would graft the acquisitions of contemporary science onto an always healthily maintained humanistic trunk.
Galea continued to show how the lessons of educational and cultural policy under Borg Olivier (including the mistakes, since inevitably everything was far from perfect) could provide us with guidance for the future as they have done in the past. This meant essentially transposing the approaches that were suitable in the context when nation-state sovereignty was paramount to the vastly different pluralist context that accompanies globalisation.
Galea stressed that there should be full acceptance of the positive value of pluralism. However, it was still possible for education to be based not on relativism, but on a set of values that should constitute the common bases which a culture needed in order to be able to flourish. This common set of values was essentially contained in the Charter of Human Rights, which should moreover be read in the light of those aspects of the Mediterranean tradition that had been moulded by the three great branches of Monotheism.
What were the most locally relevant parts of the speech?
Listeners detected a sub-text throughout. There was a third undercurrent of questioning, beside the two overt ones of evaluating Borg Olivier’s policies in historical perspective, and showing the need to update them.
Galea did not refer explicitly to the policies that he had been adumbrating in his last years in office as Minister of Education concerning, for instance, tertiary education. Clearly he had not intervened so directly when it came to the appointment of the University rector if it were not because he associated a kind of policy with the person.
He did not want the chief guide of the University to be just an expert in computer science, or even a successful manager. It was because the author of the original national strategy for Information Technology in Malta had shown full awareness of the anthropological implications of the electronic revolution and what both a knowledge economy and a knowledge society meant. But how consistently do all the stakeholders hold a common vision?
Likewise, it was certainly not by chance that the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (re-established by Galea after the Borg Olivier foundation had been whisked out of existence by Mintoff, because the understanding of the difference in function between a university and a polytechnic had been lost) had a distinguished professor from the engineering faculty of the University appointed as its head. This new polytechnic has been very successful in recruiting students and is establishing degree courses. But there is no sign yet of even a stone having been laid as the beginning of the new promised campus that is so essential to provide the environment for tertiary studies.
Galea’s policies are being followed through just as he walked in the footsteps of his predecessors Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and Michael Falzon to whom he paid tribute, but is the college system working as had been planned? Are we moving towards a non-partisan consideration of education?
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.