In a highly topical and well-argued editorial (April 22), The Times held that the importance of teaching Maltese history had to be "preserved and, indeed, promoted". It added, correctly, that students also needed to be more aware of "their European identity".

If the principle of subsidiarity is applied to historiography, the best way of imparting this awareness is by means of a contextualised rendering of modern Maltese history itself. Unless our history were to be seen solely and simply from a parochial or insular lens, it would have to be underpinned in an intertwined texture by the tripod of influences that mould it over time: Europe, empire and the Mediterranean.

This is the underlying methodology employed in my book on the 19th century, Żmien l-Ingliżi Vol. I, which is now a textbook in the upper forms of public secondary schools (and which will recur in a companion volume on the 20th century in due course). Whether it be the Napoleonic era or the Crimean War, the origins of corporate banking or of nationalism, freedom of the press or Catholic-Anglican tensions, emigration or carnival, the Risorgimento or philharmonic societies, the "tripod" nexus applies. To a greater or lesser degree, such an approach opens constantly a window on inside-outside influences and inter-actions, including discourse or an absence of it.

However, for all the country's schools, only a couple of hundred copies of this text book were purchased by the government simply because, given the present set-up, relatively few opt to take history as a subject up to O- level. If the proposed scheme, posted on the Education Department's own website, were to be implemented, the learning of Maltese and of European history would dwindle further. Hence, what The Times rightly defined as "an uproar" following my Talking Point entitled Save Maltese History (March 27). Assurances that this detailed scheme, which has been brewing for some time, is suddenly only a suggestion, open to discussion, would seem to be negatived by persistent allegations that at least one of the new "colleges" has already adopted it while another one apparently intends doing so come the next scholastic year.

In a little corner of the same edition of The Times on page 17, on the eve of World Book Day, we learn from Education Minister Dolores Cristina in reply to a parliamentary question that in the one year, between 2007 and 2008, the number of books borrowed from our libraries went down by 54,644.

This may be because computers are winning the "war' against books or it may be something else. Whatever it is, clearly, the less books are read the more illiteracy or semi-literacy will prevail and proliferate.

Here again, the principle of "subsidiarity in historiography" should apply. One way of encouraging reading is to have books written engagingly, intelligibly and as comprehensively as possible about what lies close by, the point of origin, the surroundings.

That is, our own islands and their inhabitants as these have en-dured, survived, prospered and generally been moulded and how they have responded, in space and time. Geography inevitably has been an element in the making or unmaking of many a nation, certainly including Malta, but history has long been an all-encompassing matrix discipline and a liberal education in its own right, predicated on knowledge no less than skill.

If current trends persist, without some understanding and encouragement, and in so small a market, in one of the world's tiniest ethno-linguistic minorities, publishers may start to think twice before having a serious history book printed and, indeed, authors before having one written, especially if it targets school curricula, the more so perhaps if it is in Maltese.

That would hardly be a hallmark or a harbinger of European identity.

The author is professor of history and director of the Institute of Maltese Studies.