Higher Education, Socialism & Industrial Development. Dom Mintoff and the ‘Worker - Student Scheme’

Abstract

This article focuses on the recently deceased Maltese socialist leader Dom Mintoff (1916-2012) and his introduction of a scheme that was intended to change higher education and develop it ostensibly on socialist lines but, in effect, in a manner intended to facilitate the country’s transition from mercantile capitalism to that of productive industrial development. The scheme he introduced, with its immediate socialist echoes but which warrants more careful scrutiny to unveil both its contradictions and real economic purpose, was the Worker-Student scheme, arguably Mintoff’s original, albeit much decried and controversial, contribution to higher education thinking. In this paper, I will take a look at the main issues surrounding the concept of the worker-student scheme and the way they were put into practice during the scheme’s almost ten year period of existence (1978-1987). I shall analyse them in the context of the Malta Labour Party’s then professed socialist politics. What are the contradictions and consistencies regarding what have come to be regarded as key concepts in a socialist politics of education?

Keywords

• education
• employment and training
• state
• state socialism
• workers
• development