Education and development in Malta ; Malta human development report
As we have argued earlier, education is one among a number of features of a social formation that can contribute to human development. The UNDP articulates the latter in terms of creating 'an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives', widening'~ people's choices and increasing the level of their achieved well-being. Together with health care, political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self-respect, education figures highly as a contributing element to the fulfillment of these aspirations. The UNDP significantly distances itself from other approaches that purport to explain the linkage between education and human development. The most notable of these approaches is the human capital theory, which was pioneered in the post-war period by a number of economists such as Nobel prize-winner TW Schultz, Peter Drucker and BA Weisbrod. For a long period of time, this approach was promoted by such development agencies as the World Bank. Human capital theory, or theories of human resource development as it is now increasingly referred to, tends to look at people as a means to an end, that is in terms of their capacity to increase production. It treats education as an industry which generates the desired amounts of functional manpower. Consequently, the development of educated and skilled people, their number, quality and utilisation, is considered to be the most significant index of the wealth-production capacity of a country. The implications of this is that education will produce individuals with an increased general and job-specific knowledge which they subsequently can apply in an expanding economy, both to better utilise new technical developments and to generate innovations. The result is a marked pay-off in terms of increased production, yielding greater national wealth, corporate profits and individual wages. For the purpose of this report it is crucial to understand the distinction between views of education and development promoted by the United Nations Development Programme on the one hand, and those of the World Bank (to mention only one of the more important agencies) on the other. This understanding is particularly important given the fact that, irrespective of the differing political views of various governments, human capital theory approaches have been very influential in Malta from the post-war period to the present day. This is evident in the various development plans that closely link education with economic progress. The change in name from Ministry of Education, Culture and Environment to Ministry of Education and Human Resources after the 1992 General Elections merely serves to highlight and make more explicit the assumed link between education and the economy, where the former is considered to be a key partner in sustaining, even leading the latter by the best development of human potential. The change in nomenclature for the portfolio represents a formal marriage between education and development, a union which had in fact been consummated much earlier as Malta strove to become not only politically, but also economically self-reliant. The influence of Thomas Balogh in the promotion of human capital theory in Malta and other British colonies and several nations on the African continent needs to be underlined in this context. The different approach to education and development promoted by the UNDP is useful because it helps one distinguish between quantitative and qualitative issues in educational provision. It leads the basic question as to the manner in which educational expansion increased the well-being of citizens. Of course, the quantitative dimension of the question is rather more easily addressed, given that 'all' it requires is a set of numeric parameters to measure the trends and direction in the delivery of the service. The qualitative dimension, indexed by the woolly phrase 'well-being of people', is much more subjective and less amenable to measurement. This does not make it in any way less important. Indeed, the treatment of people as 'human capital', as units that contribute to production, obfuscates and mystifies the relationship that exists between education and production on the one hand, and domination and exploitation on the other. Indeed, research has tended to show that rather than leading to human well-being, education systems are directly involved in selecting and stratifying people - often on criteria that have more to do with class, race, and gender than 'objective' intellectual ability - and then channeling particular categories of students towards specific locations in a segmented labour market. While some of these segments are characterised by work conditions and remuneration that lead to healthy, creative life-styles, others are not. Schools are, thus, directly involved in the 'cooling out' of groups of students who are thus channeled towards the less lucrative and fulfilling sectors in the economy. There are those who claim that education systems are predicated on a logic of success for some, and failure for others. For, if an educator's dream that all students successfully complete a course of study were to come true, how would society be able to select, park and store all these students in the job hierarchy? This explains why a number of Maltese educational sociologists in the post-war period have consistently argued that education systems should be considered systems of violence rather more than of development. This report gives an overview of both the quantitative and qualitative growth in education provision, raises issues and draw conclusions related to the problematic relationship between both. This is particularly important not only in terms of the exercise of providing the education component of the human development index, but also because current official discourse in the field of educational development and policy making is steeped in quantitative rather than qualitative considerations, a point that has been made by the Minister of Education and Human Resources Consultative Body's report Tomorrow's Schools: Developing Effective Learning Cultures. ; peer-reviewed
