Ethics education in Maltese state schools : a response to otherness or a contribution to othering?

Abstract

While Malta has lately taken a leap forward in terms of social progressivism, its Constitution obliges state school to teach the teachings of Roman Catholicism, reflecting the privilege the Catholic Church retains in the country. This fact causes tension with the demographic changes, mainly due to migration and growing secularisation. As a response to the increasing number of students in Maltese states schools opting out of Catholic Religious Education, with the new National Curriculum Framework of 2012, the Ethics Education Programme was established.

This study, which is grounded in Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of ethics as first philosophy, and adopts postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, questions if the teaching of Ethics is an adequate response to the otherness of the cultural and religious other in schools. Specifically, through a theoretical thematic analysis and personal reflections, I problematise the oversimplification by which the teaching of Ethics is said to cater for the diversity of its students. I argue that the Ethics Education curriculum’s alignment to shared universal values and rational autonomy, idealised in the Western philosophical tradition, others the particularities of students whose outlook and beliefs are different. It tends to assimilate the cultural and religious other into a Westernised way of knowing and thinking, which can constitute ethical violence. Within this totality, the Ethics teacher plays a pivotal role in lessening this violence by adopting an understanding of teaching as an act of responsibility that opens itself to the vulnerability of students.