CATALONIA -- Attacks on linguistic immersion generate indignation and calls for disobedience - VilaWeb

Attacks on linguistic immersion generate indignation and calls for disobedience - VilaWeb

 Minister Rigau is completely opposed to the TSJC ruling 

'The People’s Party (PP) wants to impose the same model in Catalonia
that they have in Valencia and the Balearic Islands,' said Irene Rigau,
Catalonia's Minister of Education with respect to the Supreme Court of
Justice (TSJC) ruling that requires five Catalan schools to set the
minimum usage of Spanish at 25% of class time. Current Catalan law
stipulates that Catalan be the language of instruction in Catalan
schools, except for required Spanish language classes.

Rigau
added, 'They want to extend the special treatment recognized by the law
for a single student to the entire group and all of the courts had
accepted that that is an unimaginable situation, a conflict that we have
always tried to avoid in our schools,' But reactions from the school
system and civil society were much more blunt. Somescola, Esquerra,
Iniciativa, and the CUP demanded that the Catalan government defend
linguistic immersion in the schools against the attacks from the TSJC
and to disobey the court's orders.

In their communiqué, Somescola said that the education model in our
country should not be decided through the legal system but that it must
be the Parliament of Catalonia who establishes its own legislation,
'according to the democratic mandate that we Catalans have expressed at
the polls'. Somescola rejected the ruling out of hand, and asked the
Generalitat to continue to safeguard the Catalan model of linguistic
immersion, insisting that 'the Department of Education is the
administrative organ that has jurisdiction over the distribution of
class hours and assigning the amount of usage of languages. The TSJC
does not have this pedagogic capacity nor this organizational function.'

Somescola.cat—a coalition that organizes civic end educational
groups—explains in the same communiqué that next week the group will
meet to prepare a response to the TSJC attack and will make a call to
the community 'in order to continue defending the consensus forged over
the past thirty years in Catalonia on linguistic immersion, which
guarantees equal opportunity and social cohesion in Catalonia.'

Iniciativa, Esquerra, and the CUP demand that the government maintain
the linguistic immersion model, irrespective of the TSJC ruling

For its part, ICV's national coordinator, Dolors Camats, asked the
government yesterday to maintain the linguistic immersion model
irrespective of what the TSJC ruled. The spokesperson for ICV-EUiA, Joan
Mena, expressed the same opinion to the Education Committee, demanding
that the government exhaust 'all legal recourses possible in order to
keep the legal impositions from overruling educational criteria.' Mena
stressed that the judges cannot establish percentages without knowing
the plurilinguistic reality of the schools and warned that this decision
not only tries to undermine the linguistic immersion model but also the
principle of autonomy of individual schools.

The spokesperson for Esquerra, Anna Simó, also insisted that the
Catalan government defend linguistic immersion to the end, if necessary
in the Constitutional Court (TC). Simó underscored that the legal
framework in Catalonia is the LEC, which guarantees linguistic
competency in both Catalan and Spanish without discriminating against
students or separating them into language groups. Given the TSJC ruling,
Simón said it was 'completely unfair that the will of the minority
should try to overrule the laws that apply to the majority, and that
violate the rights of the other schoolmates, and Catalonia's
legislation.' 'There is a minority that wants to exclude Catalan from
the model we have agreed on democratically,' she said. And she stated
that 'a completely orquestrated battle is being fought in the legal
system that was already lost at the ballot boxes'.

The member of Parliament for the CUP, Isabel Vallet, was even more
clear as she called for disobedience and warned of the 'Spanishizing
offensive' all around the Catalan Countries and in all areas. She gave a
few examples: the Wert law (which centralizes school curriculum in
Madrid, and minimizes use of Catalan and Catalonia-related subjects in
school), the public administration law, the law of symbols, the
elimination of Catalan as the language of instruction in Valencian
schools, and the trilingualism decree in the Balearic Islands (which
substitutes Spanish for Catalan under the guise of expanding English
use). For the CUP, civil and institutional disobedience are key. 'If we
don't take advantage of the strength of our unity, we will be destroyed
as a people,' said Vallet, paraphrasing the Valencian essayist Joan
Fuster.