Catalan and Spanish governments clash over Catalan language in schools

Barcelona (ACN).- Catalonia is facing one of the biggest “threats” to its educational system since the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, according to the Catalan government. The Catalan executive has reacted angrily to the latest proposal by the Spanish minister of Education, José Ignacio Wert, to relegate Catalan to a third-class subject in schools while Spanish would continue to be a ‘core subject’. Wert said in Congress some weeks ago that he wants to “Hispanicize” Catalan pupils. His legislative proposal, presented less than two weeks after the Catalan elections, is now threatening to make any kind of reconciliation between his conservative party, the PP, and the Catalan government even more unlikely. Catalan minister Irene Rigau left a meeting in Madrid to express her opposition to the motion. She said that the proposals presented are “not negotiable” for the Catalans.

The proposal is full of ideas that have caused a row in Catalonia, and great criticism in social media like Facebook or Twitter with hastags such as #wertgonya. While downgrading the importance of Catalan as a subject, the draft also forces the Catalan government to offer more subjects in Spanish, therefore challenging the current model. For the last decades, Catalan has been the language of instruction in order to guarantee that all pupils end their studies knowing both official languages.

The draft law also says that the Catalan government should pay for private education in Spanish for those families that ask for it as far as the system “is not reasonable” in offering of both languages. The Catalan Minister for Education, Irene Rigau, said that the project “completely kills” the Catalan educational system and warned she won’t implement it in Catalonia. In fact, according to her, Wert’s proposal is the “worst” legislative piece on the teaching of regional languages “since 1978”.

The proposal would relegate the Catalan language to a ‘specialized subject’ at schools, while the Spanish language would continue to be a ‘core subject’ and a second foreign language would be taught as a ‘specific subject’.Board exams in secondary education won’t include the Catalan language and more curricular content would be dictated by the central government. Religion would be optional, but ‘Civic Education’ would disappear in favor of a ‘moral’ subject called ‘Ethics’.

The Catalan President, Artur Mas, has called an extraordinary and unprecedented meeting with all the political parties that defend the current linguistic model in Catalan schools (all except the conservative People’s Party and Ciutadans). The meeting will also include the Schools’ Council and will be an opportunity to plan a reaction to the “threatening” Spanish law. Alongside Mas, Oriol Junqueras, from the ERC, Pere Navarro, from the Catalan Socialists PSC, and Joan Herrera, from the Greens ICV-EUiA, will also participate in the summit.

In Catalonia's public schools, Catalan is the language of instruction in order to guarantee that all pupils finish their studies knowing both official languages: Catalan and Spanish. Spanish is taught as a subject. The model works, and Catalan pupils not only know Catalan but they also get the same results as the rest of Spain in Spanish language exams, if not better. In addition, the model has been praised as a good practice by the European Commission and UNESCO.

However, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that Spanish should be the language of instruction in Catalan schools based on an appeal by 3 parents, who took the Catalan Government to court for not schooling their children in Spanish within the public education system of Catalonia. Many legal experts think that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to change the entire school model, already defined by several laws. Furthermore, the Spanish Constitutional Court has validated the Catalan school model twice, in 1994 and in 2010. In addition, teacher unions and parents associations back the current model.

This controversy has been used by some Spanish politicians throughout Spain, most of them from the People's Party (PP). According to most Catalan political parties, it is a false controversy only created for electoral reasons to feed Spanish nationalism. In fact, the draft law proposed by Wert is seen as a concession to these right-wing demands.

The Catalan government, with the support of most of the civic society in Catalonia and the main political parties, teachers and students unions, is planning to fight any attempt to change the current educational system in Catalonia. Minister Irene Rigau warned that they could try to challenge the Spanish law in the Constitutional Court. The project, still to be debated, could be passed because the PP has an overall majority in the Spanish parliament. Rigau argued that Catalan law should “prevail”. “We are facing an attack, and I don’t know if that’s because of a personal obsession by minister Wert or from the Spanish Government. Rajoy said he wanted to rebuild bridges with Catalonia…and now he’s hurting the Catalan society like that”, she said.