The lost ‘Smart Island’ generation

Seventeen years ago, Malta aspired to become the 'Smart Island,' envisioning a future driven by innovation and a well-educated workforce. Manuel Delia reflects on this ambition, highlighting the generation now struggling with educational inequalities and falling short of basic academic benchmarks.

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Manuel Delia

Seventeen years ago, this country told itself it would become the 'Smart Island.' Before the last general election to confirm the PN in office, a new strategy by that name was published. It harnessed the government's performance in promoting online public services, and it accompanied the news of the then-nascent project of building a new 'smart city' south of the Grand Harbour.

It elaborated a vision for a near future when our small size, geographical peripherality, and limited capital would no longer be barriers to growth. Our longstanding work ethic and tradition of innovation would now be able to exploit technology to let us ride the big waves with the rest of them.

We'd live on a 'smart island' made of smart people. It was never about technology itself but the ability of a resilient and flexible workforce to make the best use of it.

I can see you squinting and digging in the deep recesses of your memory. I will spare you the pain of vague familiarity. I was a junior government official promoting the Smart Island strategy, and though I cannot claim to have had any role in conceiving the ideas in that plan—smarter people were needed for that—I had a hand in selling it to the public.

Let's not debate how the dream of a world-class tech farm in Kalkara became another real estate scramble. Indeed, that development was supposed to be merely a symptom of Malta's smartness, not its cause. Let's debate instead about how smart we've turned out to be.

I'm going to be conventional about this. I will not attribute any symbolic or esoteric significance to the word 'smart'. I'll use it to mean what it meant for us in the schoolyard when we stood at four feet two and whispered in awe about the handful of kids that would score the 90s in all the tests and save their teams at the relay race on sports day. That's what 'smart' meant to us. It wasn't about sweet blessings like flowing hair and an irresistible smile. It was about how quickly the smart kids grasped this week's math problem and how little it took them to memorise the verses of last week's poem. The smart ones were the ones we envied, resented or admired and wished to emulate.

By that measure of equations and poetry, how smart is this island? Compared to the rest of the EU, we're not that amazing. Twenty-seven per cent of our adults aged 25 to 54 years have not made it to an 'O' level standard of education. That's one in three who cannot show basic literacy and numeracy certification and have nothing to document their 11 years of formal education. Portugal, Italy, and Spain have an even more significant proportion of low achievers. The rest of Europe is better off than us.

Early renders of the Smart City project

Less than half of the Maltese in that age group have achieved any level of tertiary achievement, even the most modest. We're not only talking about doctorates or degrees here. We also include certificate or diploma courses lasting less than a year. Our ratio of tertiary education population has statistically hit the EU target, which is a better showing than half of the other EU member states. Being average is hardly a great result for a 'smart island'. Consider we're worse off than the remaining half. Is that so smart?

This magazine's edition focuses on technology and how that can make us money. It's worth remembering that of every Maltese person aged 20 to 29, just 1 has a degree in any technical subject like science, mathematics, computing, engineering, manufacturing or construction; by any standard, that's an abysmal rate. In the EU, Luxembourg alone has a lower rate. Every other EU state boasts more technologists and mathematicians per capita than we do. I won't ask you if that sounds smart.

Let's drill down, shall we? After all, a good measure of how well we have realised our vision is to look at the 'smart island generation', the babies born when that vision was published in 2007 and who went through the rite of passage of finishing their compulsory schooling just last year. The Smart Island babies are 17. Almost half of those who sat for their math's O' level last year failed (I mean, they could not get a grade of 5 or higher).

Not all 17-year-olds were destined to be computer engineers when they were born. But I suspect the visionaries of 2007 would be properly appalled to know that in 2024, half of that year's babies can barely count as they enter adulthood. Okay, that is an exaggeration. They may be able to count, but they can't recall Pythagoras' theorem to save their lives.

There is a remarkable difference in sub-group performance within that 'Smart Island' cohort. The paths their parents chose for them at birth, not least because of the differences in their means, had more to do with their schooling outcome than any highfalutin' government document. Consider that more than half of today's 17-year-olds who got their schooling in church or independent schools secured enough qualifications to continue some schooling beyond their compulsory years. If you leave aside the better-performing Gozitan students, less than a third of state school leavers have enough qualifications to continue their studies.

That's a big difference. Half, rather than a third, would not need help to work that out if they had the privilege of avoiding government-run schools.

Smart City today

It's been some time since anyone has dared to proclaim the ambition that state schools should give their students the best education available in the country and that education should be the great leveller. Instead, as smart as this island was supposed to be, it never smartened up enough to unshackle its children from the perpetuation of its ingrained inequalities.

Two-thirds of public education students who have taught in the years since the authorities of this country proclaimed their ambition to make Malta a 'Smart Island' has been abandoned to relative dumbhood.

We're talking about percentages, but put this in context. In 2007, the year this generation was born, nearly 8,000 candidates were sitting for O-level exams. By 2023, that number slipped precipitously to 5,000. Our population did not shrink by 40%, which likely means that fewer school leavers even sat for exams to begin with.

Malta has undoubtedly enjoyed decades of economic growth and success. As it did so, however, the old maxim that the only resource available to our economy is our people has atrophied, along with our intellectual ability to excel at school. Take the many technology businesses thriving in this country and consider the profiles of many of their employees. The bright stars are imported. We don't do the work. Like decadent ancients or Georgian landed gentry, we instead profit from the rent that the "expats" pay out of their considerable salaries.

The more that happens, the less incentive we have to grow smarter future generations. It's not just about sophisticated mathematics and precision engineering. It's about most economic activity where real things are made, built, or repaired. Too few of us seem keen to get our hands dirty. We import labour from Europe or South Asia so people can work for us while we lose our willingness and ability to take the initiative.

Like the decadent ancients or Georgian landed gentry, we are making ourselves redundant, forgetting—perhaps comically—the point of Pythagoras's theorem. One day, this island might wonder when it forgot that it's smart to be smart.

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