Classroom Catalan fuels political storm
Judicial ruling in support of parental choice sets the Popular Party against all other regional groupings; judges question exact implications of sentence
The political war on the Catalan language has been reopened just two months before the November 20 general elections. The ultimatum given by the Catalan regional High Court of Justice (TSJC) stating that Spanish should also be "the vehicular language" in public schools has triggered a clear refusal from the Generalitat regional government which strongly defends the current Catalan education model based on bilingual immersion. Meanwhile, the conservative Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy has warned premier Artur Mas' executive that it must comply with the law even though there are uncertainties on the objectives and consequences of the resolution.
The Catalan government is convinced that the system will continue unchanged even after the two-month period allowed for enacting the ruling expires. "In two months, absolutely nothing will happen. We won't separate the children according to languages," warned regional education chief Irene Rigau earlier this week, defending a model that has most citizens' support as it allows children, independent of their origin and social class, to finish their education mastering both languages and access the job market in equal conditions.
The CiU ruling nationalist bloc is not alone in this case. The left also rejects a system with a two-pathway education of the type that has helped to divide society in two in Belgium, with the ERC party urging the authorities to ignore the resolution. The nationalists have the PP as preferential partner in the regional assembly but made it clear that the language case could become a casus belli . For its part, the PP has presented a resolution proposal in the Senate asking the government to comply with the sentence.
In the midst of ongoing protests against the CiU government's program of wide-ranging social cuts, the court ruling gives the Catalan government the opportunity to stand up for what it considers most important: language. The social environment is also heating up. On Monday, hundreds of people demonstrated in Lleida and Girona against this "attack" to the education model, while the platform Som Escola (We are school), which unites unions and parents, plans to assemble groups in front of all Catalan city halls on September 12, the first day of the academic year.
Whatever happens, the TSJC gives the Generalitat a period of two months to amend the Catalan education model to comply with a Supreme Court ruling of December 2010. This ruling recognized some parents' rights to educate their children in Castilian but it remains unclear if this entails a generic application to the entire public education system, say different sources.
On Sunday, the president of the TSJC declared that the decree only applied to the parents who had lodged the initial petition, but a day later he was forced to admit that the ruling should be applied in a broader sense. The judgment says that the Generalitat "must adopt precise measures" to enable parents to choose. But what does the Catalan government have to do to comply? "One solution could be to have a minimum number of subjects in Spanish but we are not talking about a separate branch of education," says Ángel Escolano, lawyer of Convivencia Cívica Catalana, an association that supports the families behind the case.
"In these rulings, there is always a degree of ambiguity that allows for different interpretations," explains a professor of constitutional law who prefers not to reveal his name.
The Supreme Court resolution takes as a reference the sentence of the Constitutional Court on the Catalan autonomy statute that ambiguously declares: "Catalan needs to be the vehicular language of education but must not be the only one to benefit from that status." It adds that Catalan needs to be the "center of gravity" of the education model.
"There is no linguistic or juridical problem" says the spokesman of Judges for Democracy, José Luis Ramírez, who puts the blame on "biased" interpretations.
The Catalan government has involved itself at the highest level in its response to the TSJC ruling. The education department is obtaining more data to back up the appeal against the court's resolution that it must present by today. The aim is to defend the fact that the Catalan model of education fits into the Spanish Constitution, demonstrating that it allows students to acquire similar notions of both Spanish and Catalan, and that it is a "successful system," in the words of the Generalitat.
These same arguments have been given to 500 families who asked for a more Spanish education in a document with 500 parents' signatures. Catalan PP leader Alicia Sánchez Camacho presented this paper last June ahead of Catalan regional elections. Convivencia Cívica Catalana states that 800 families have called upon the justice system to defend their rights to choose their academic language.
A linguistic model for each region
In Spain, there are as many language models as there are bilingual regions. It goes from the decision on the importance of the vernacular language of the Basque Country to Galician trilinguism. In the latter region, until recently, more than a year ago, the rule was that at least 50 percent of the subjects must be taught in Galician, the same rule that applies in the Balearic Islands with regard to Catalan.
But Alberto Núñez Feijóo's government changed the system in June 2010 to introduce English into the classrooms to share space with the already existing two languages. Its introduction will be gradual and at first only a small part of the students will receive a third in each language - the objective of the Xunta. It does, however, put Spanish and Galician on equal footing, with differing subjects taught in both languages. The Valencian region was going to imitate the Galician model almost word for word until Monday, when the Valencian government and the educational sector met and decided to take more time to think it over. The current model benefits from a wide consensus and includes three pathways: a minimum of 33 percent Castilian and 33 percent Valenciano, along with a foreign language; everything in Valenciano except what the school decides to dedicate to Spanish in the other subjects; or four hours in Castilian and the rest in Valenciano and another language.
The Basque Country also has a three-way pattern. The A model has Spanish as its main language and Euskera as a subject, and the B model is bilingual Basque-Castilian (with only Spanish and math in Spanish). The C model consists in teaching everything in Euskera and leaving Spanish as a single subject. In Navarre, the territory is divided into three zones (North, Pamplona and South) according to the respective weights of Euskera or Spanish.
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