St Michael’s College

As we celebrated the feast of St John Baptist de la Salle, patron saint of all teachers of youth on May 15, we could not but be grateful to the hundreds of De la Salle Brothers who contributed so much to local education, both through their schools as well as by training teachers for several decades.

In the late 1940s, they established St Michael’s Training College to offer the first formal teacher training for male teachers – a one-year, non-residential course at the end of which students were appointed teachers in the primary schools. (A similar course for female students was offered at Mater Admirabilis Training College, in Rabat.)

I was there in 1952-53, in what must have been the fourth or fifth year of the college. The college took in 30 students every year, half selected from emergency teachers who had been appointed without any training to meet teacher shortage and the other half from secondary school-leavers, after a call for applications and an interview, the marks for which were added to the marks obtained in GCE O-level passes.

The college was in reality a moderately-sized town house on one side of Villa Rosa, where today there is the Bay Street Complex but it had the necessary space for lectures and communal activities, including Mass and lunch every day.

Bro. Leo Barrington was the principal who, together with Bro. Cuthman and Bro. Alfred covered most of the subjects we had to study. An inspector from the Education Department came once a week for Maltese; Carmelo Mangion came for art and we went to the Sliema primary school once a week where Joseph Sammut took us for woodwork. We also had one lecture a week in history of art by Mr Attard Cassar.

The teaching philosophy of the college was to enhance the knowledge of the subjects that needed to be taught in the primary classroom and, at the same time, to teach the best methods of doing so.

Bro. Leo was a strict disciplinarian. Taller than most of us, he had a certain dignity and authority that no one dared defy. At the same time, he was approachable and friendly and would walk and talk with us during breaks.

Bro. Cuthman was more affable and he mixed more with us. He dealt with outdoor activities and sports and insisted on forming two football teams out of the 30 students in the college.

Bro. Alfred was gentle, quiet and unassuming. He often found himself frustrated by the attitude of some of us.

We had two periods of teaching practice so that, at the end of the course, we felt confident that we could handle a class and that we had understood what it meant to be a teacher.

In later years, the university would lift teaching to professional status but we left St Michael’s convinced that teaching was, in reality, a vocation.

Joseph Muscat – Attard