The Government instructs foreign consuls on immersion without mentioning 25%

The Generalitat has started a propaganda campaign in favor of the linguistic immersion model in school to prepare the ground for the visit scheduled for next December of a delegation from the European Parliament to Catalonia.

Following the complaints presented by the Assembly for a Bilingual School (AEB), this mission will have the purpose of verifying whether the rights of Spanish-speaking students are respected and analyzing the reasons for the Government's failure to comply with the final ruling of the Superior Court of Justice. Catalan that requires Spanish to have a quota of at least 25% of teaching hours.

Given the discomfort caused by this visit, the Ministers of Foreign Action, Meritxell Serret, and of Education, Anna Simó, yesterday accompanied around twenty consuls to visit two schools, La Muntanyeta in Barcelona – a center that, according to the AEB, He dedicates more hours to learning English than Spanish and kept yellow ribbons on the exterior façade for two years – and the Francesc Aldea i Pérez de Terrassa.

Despite the various judicial rulings that have imposed percentages of subjects in Spanish in classrooms of several Catalan schools, the two counselors of the Generalitat admitted that they did not address this situation with the consular representatives and that the reason for the visit was to make known how The Catalan educational model works.

Serret stressed that it is “essential” that the members of the consular corps “know first-hand the system and, especially, linguistic immersion.”. “Through the Catalan school model, the consuls also make an approximation of what Catalan society is like,” said the counselor, who added that “this successful system, which responds to a great consensus in the country,” allows “to build a “more cohesive society, with more equal opportunities for all and more prosperous.”

“Although there have been attempts to attack and belittle the Catalan school model, from the institutions and from the entire educational community we will continue to demand it,” he added.

Counselor Simó, for her part, assured that “linguistic conflict does not exist in the classrooms” of Catalonia and that “whoever wants to generate it responds to a political strategy.”

The head of the Department of Education expressed her rejection of the judicial imposition of linguistic percentages because, in her opinion, they do not respond to pedagogical criteria. Simó believes that the ruling that requires a minimum of 25% of classes to be taught in each of the two official languages is part of a “political strategy that seeks to make learning Catalan difficult and break coexistence.”

«Some would like Catalan to be a small language, a self-conscious language, at home, a patois, and that we would keep it in a corner where it would not get in the way. Well no, we do not give up because that is minoritizing a language,” claimed the counselor.

The two schools showed their educational projects in a day that was part of the actions that the Pere Aragonès Executive is carrying out to promote the Catalan language, also internationally, and “establish relationships of trust and regular work with the Foreign governments” through their representations in Barcelona.

Simó explained that the consular members were able to observe the educational model of La Muntanyeta, a center that brings together students with 24 languages from different origins and in which workshops are held “to improve the management of linguistic diversity in educational centers and encourage the learning and use of Catalan.

New Government decree

These workshops are one of the activities planned in the Plan to promote the Catalan language in educational centers prepared by the Government, which includes a dozen measures, such as increasing reception resources for newly arrived students, improving linguistic competence in Catalan of teachers or the approval and development of the decree of the linguistic regime of the educational system with which the Generalitat intends to shield immersion.

Just yesterday, the Catalan Civil Society announced that it has presented allegations to the draft of that decree before the Department of Education, since it considers that its content is “clearly unconstitutional.”

«The statutory competence to attribute to the language of Catalonia the status of vehicle cannot be exercised in terms of exclusivity or preference, since it would affect the position of Castilian in an unconstitutional way by endangering the right to its use and the fulfillment of the duty of their knowledge,” considers the entity.

In its allegations, it points out that the draft decree represents “a flagrant violation” of article 3 of the Spanish Constitution, “which establishes that all Spaniards have the duty to know Spanish and the right to use it, regardless of which community.” autonomously reside.