In the midst of the political uproar, the Government has transferred this Friday to the judges its plan to comply with the sentence that requires it to teach 25% of the classes in Spanish. It is based, in particular, on the pact between PSC, ERC, Junts and the comuns to change the linguistic regulations that maintain Catalan as the vehicular language, but adds for the first time that Spanish is also used in classes depending on the characteristics from each center.
PSC, ERC, Junts and comuns recognize Spanish as the language of use at school for the first time
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The Minister of Education, Josep González Cambray, outlines in a letter – which can be consulted at the end of this information – addressed to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) the path chosen by the Catalan Executive to comply with the ruling that ends linguistic immersion . It does so by directly citing the article of the contentious-administrative law that obliges the parties to a lawsuit “to comply with the sentences in the form and terms that are recorded in them”, and when this Friday the term that the Justice gave to the Generalitat ends to voluntarily enforce the 25% judgment.
Like the new standard, Cambray’s response does not mention a specific percentage of Spanish in the classroom. Neither the 25% claimed by the magistrates nor any other. The reason is that the Government argues that setting a percentage violates pedagogical principles, since the Catalan educational system already guarantees the learning of both official languages.
Will it be enough for the judges? It remains to be seen. Those who have already said that they are not the associations opposed to immersion, who have already advanced that on Monday they will ask the TSJC to address the directors of each center to urge them to comply yes or yes with the 25% of Spanish, which implies giving in that language another core subject in addition to the class of Castilian language and literature.
In addition to the legislative amendment – which has not yet been approved and from which Junts has dropped – Cambray has alleged in court the new linguistic decree whose process began this Tuesday. The norm deploys a new linguistic model that does not refer to percentages of languages either. The third point in Cambray’s response to the TSJC is to announce that he has commissioned the sociolinguistics and communication research center of the University of Barcelona (UB) to carry out a survey on the sociolinguistic reality of Catalan centers in view of the latest studies that indicate “a drop progressive in the use of Catalan”.
Finally, the minister transferred to the judges the latest report from the Síndic de Greuges, the Catalan Ombudsman, which after a survey in half of the schools revealed that Catalan is used in 62% of school time and Spanish in 33% in primary and 60% and 32% in secondary. They are the only percentages that appear in the letter, which serve the Government to argue that the reality of the Catalan school already complies with the 25% sentence.
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