The court ruling by which a school in Canet de Mar is obliged to teach 25 percent of teaching in Spanish It has unleashed a perfect storm in which at least three issues intermingle on which a deep debate guided by reason is necessary and which, too often, is tainted by passion. These are three interrelated debates that affect different issues and should be addressed separately.
First of all, the conception of language immersion as a mechanism to guarantee the promotion of Catalan as Catalonia’s own language, its social use and its protection as the minority language that it is and more in a context in which empirical evidence reveals that backtracking is taking place. Immersion has contributed to the social use of the language but There are other ways that also promote the use of Catalan and can contribute to maintaining it as a language of social prestige.: culture, university, media, administration, leisure and business. Only if these areas are ignored would 25 percent of Spanish in school be a threat to the survival of Catalan and it would be necessary to accept that its decline is irreversible.
On the other hand, the commitment that the school guarantee full oral and written mastery, at least of the two official languages existing in Catalonia, Catalan and Spanish. And that is something that, whatever the PISA reports say, is not always guaranteed. But not only is it not in Catalonia, which has two languages, but also not in the rest of Spain. Thus, it is not something that has to do with the number of languages in which teaching is taught and not even with the quality of teaching but, rather, the quality of the requirement, which seems to have been decreasing in recent years. It is not admissible that university students, who are the most prepared a priori, commit syntactic and spelling mistakes. And they do it in both Catalan and Spanish. Attest. For this reason, it would perhaps be more useful if, instead of shouting ‘Catalan is not touch’, the educational community mobilized to shouting ‘Les normes ortogràfiques are not optional’.
And, finally, there is the question of recognized law, and not because a judge says so but because it was established by both the Llei de Normalització Lingüística of 1983 and the Llei de Politica Lingüística, that children have right to receive the first education in their habitual language, either in Catalan or in Spanish, that the administration has to put in place the means to make it effective and that parents or guardians can demand it on their behalf, urging that it apply. No one can be criminalized because they use their rights and the harassment suffered by Canet’s family is unacceptable in a democratic and plural society. What is required is that the administrations guarantee that all citizens can exercise their rights and above all that they do not demonize the minority or try to prevent it through subterfuge. That is exactly what illiberal democracies do.
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Language laws were passed by consensus, but that consensus has faded. And it is precisely the breakdown of that consensus that makes law enforcement difficult. As long as it was unanimously accepted that Catalan was the vehicular language and no one contested it, it was possible. When challenged, it is incompatible that only Catalan is the vehicular language with the fact that all children have the right to receive their first education in both languages. And that’s a problem to be faced.
The first step is to accept the differences, stop trying to create a false sense of unanimity that scares those who think differently and stop accusing those who disagree of breaking the consensus. And only if the parties stop using the language as a throwing weapon and using it as an element of division can the linguistic richness be preserved. Otherwise the fracture will deepen, there will be citizens who will feel expelled and, if that happens, the Catalan has the upper hand to lose. You have to avoid killing her because some believe that she is only hers.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com