ADDRESS BY H. E. DR EDWARD FENECH ADAMI, PRESIDENT OF MALTA,

AT THE OPENING OF THE EUROPEAN STANDING CONFERENCE OF THE HISTORY TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION, ENTITLED

“USING HISTORICAL SKILLS AND CONCEPTS TO PROMOTE AN AWARENESS OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP”

BUGIBBA -  21 MARCH 2006

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Malta and to this conference on history teaching, and on the relation of this to citizenship.

The teaching and learning of History at all levels and in different spheres can contribute immensely to a sense of belonging and to the creation of civic spirit.  However, in this fast-changing and globalizing world, where mass communications often tend to emphasize simply the here and now, a pleasure ethic of immediacy and invidualism, I fear that a sense of citizenship may easily be lost by the wayside.  I personally believe that citizenship can be intimately related to a sense of nationhood and indeed to the notion of democracy.  However, today you may even find some theorists who suggest that nations and national identities are simply myths, old wives’ tales: such beings don’t exist at all - except in the imagination - and should be discarded forthwith.

Of course, extremes of nationalism have led to one disaster after another, not least in Europe.  Excess is always wrong, and if the past teaches us a lesson it is this.  But a sense of belonging and, at least to some extent, of identity, of self-being, actually has inspired much of the diversity and richness that has come to constitute Europeanity, including the fundamental freedoms on which modern Europe has come to rest.  The American, French and other declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the 18^th century, later enshrined in the United Nations Charter, have specific historical sources and connotations, pregnant with a historical as well as a philosophical meaning.  Citizenship was a revolt against colonial or dynastic rule, against corruption, privilege and arbitrariness.

As members of the European Union today, here in Malta, we are slowly awakening to the sense of a European citizenship as well, a citizenship beyond the traditional borders of states. But the first and deepest awareness of citizenship emanates, in my view, from a rapport, a resonance with one’s own nation, one’s own country, including its language and lore. Such an awareness hardly arises out of ignorance, or prejudice.  Nor should one citizenship exclude another.  Hence this country’s recognition of dual citizenship now: we have a Commonwealth citizenship no less than we have a European one.  To a greater or lesser extent, all these citizenships reflect a historical experience, nationally and internationally.

I read in a Sunday newspaper recently, in an interview by a former Minister of Education with a leading historian Prof Henry Frendo, that in all Maltese government schools at the secondary level no more than 250 students opt to learn history, for which at long last they have, at least, a proper textbook to go by.  Perhaps it is time that much more importance be afforded to history teaching and learning, and to the humanities generally, lest we drift into a fast-moving, soulless, utilitarian and robotized existence.  As one great poet had put it, in the face of industrialization, but without intending laziness: “What’s life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”.

History also implies research, which as we all know takes time, and demands reflection.  But the outcome of it is an informed learning process, which can be communicated and facilitated through an education by many different means of imparting knowledge and communion.  As it has long been held, the values of citizenship imply at one time rights and duties.  For such rights and duties to be felt and internalized, however, a student must first of all comprehend them in a context of time, of space, of relationships.  It is here surely where history teaching assumes great significance.  History is about knowledge, but citizenship implies rather more than that.  It is something of a moral imperative, which can be shown and taught with much dedication from an early age.

Care for others, for the environment, for heritage, for animals, for merit and fair play in society, for language, would include the disposition to do good and contribute to civic awareness, and welfare, in any society worthy of the name.  Is it not of such stuff that citizenship is made? But that is easier said than done.

Like me, all of you will have seen acts of wanton vandalism, of damaging escapism, of cruelty, destruction, unbridled egoism; of repression, insensitivity, indifference and inhumanity. Citizenship, in other words, is a normative value in civilized society, which needs a devoted and nursing attention.  It is, perhaps increasingly, an essential component of one’s education - not simply an instruction, but an education of the whole being.

Every person has too a history of one’s own, not always perhaps such a happy one, depending on the love or the want of it in one’s family and surroundings, or indeed on the type of education or the lack of it which schooling itself may have imparted or caused. This is not a negligible phenomenon; on the contrary it is the soil in which the seed of citizenship must be sown – gently, considerately and tolerantly.

What better tool than a broad appreciation of history, of man’s experience in time, in one’s country and beyond it, from one generation to the next, can there be in such a worthwhile and all too necessary endeavour? Some have spoken of an education for democracy, but first of all surely that must be an education in citizenship.  You need a legitimate self-esteem, born of an appreciation of the more positive values in society and in life generally, starting with the immediate context in which a pupil or a student is raised, taught and engaged.  Ultimately, citizenship is about a commitment to exchanging and sharing.  It can exercise a brake on the worst manifestations of excess and abuse, with which history is replete.  But that is only one side of history, its dark side. There is another brighter one, demonstrated by the upholding of higher values, heroic resistance, wonderful discoveries, sobering findings, improving conditions, a history which manifests a progression from worse to better times.  To understand the history of freedom, one cannot but know about that of repression as well; it is as in giving and receiving.  The challenge before historians, teachers, researchers, authors, specialists in pedagogy, history-conscious linguists, counsellors and psychologists, encompasses all this.

So yes, citizenship is important.  And history, taught in the right spirt, with the requiste tools, can help instil and nurture it.  It is a task you no doubt work for, and have before you, to improve upon, in this very conference.

With those random thoughts, allow me sincerely to wish you many thought-provoking deliberations on history teaching and the values of citizenship in the course of this week.  It is my pleasure to declare your conference open.

Thank you.