"The Diocesan Colleges have opted for Catalan, which is the language of our community, and a fundamental element and basis of our identity and roots in our land." This is what the School Agenda of the 2019-20 Course of the Santa María de Palma School says, one of the eleven centers that depend on the Bishopric of Mallorca, in its section: "What language is spoken in your school".
And what about the Castilian? Well, according to the agenda: "Your school will incorporate Spanish, English, as well as other foreign languages such as German and French."
From PLIS Education (Free Professors of Social Engineering), the Balearic teachers platform that claims the school "as a place of learning and not as a means of ideological instrumentalization", accuses the Church "of forming a nationalist front with the Ministry of Education in teaching , with the language flag as an excuse. "
"We are already accustomed to the Ministry of Education skipping the law and imposing mandatory immersion in Catalan, ignoring the additional provision 38 of the Lomce and the sentences that oblige to offer the Castilian also as a vehicle language; but now we find that the concerted schools dependent on the Church in the Balearic Islands add to the infraction and fraud of the law, "they denounce.
The text does not start for free from the agenda, but is included in the Institutional Educational Project with which the Bishopric of Mallorca wanted to unify the criteria of the centers dependent on the Diocese. There, in addition to talking about the pastoral profile of the centers, of Christian humanism, or of some educators who relate to the student with "humility and humanity", it was decided to dedicate a section to the linguistic profile that all centers should have.
In the text, written only in Catalan, they point out that teachers "will opt for the use of the Catalan language within all formal fields." Also that the written and oral communication of the school with parents "will be in Catalan", as well as collective meetings, and all written information, such as notifications and circulars, even those published on the website. At the same time it is said that " students' relatives will be encouraged to learn as soon as possible the vehicle language of the school, the Catalan language".
In the Linguistic Project published on the website of the Santa María de Palma School, it is specified, in a section dedicated to the sociolinguistic situation of the students, that "the majority are Spanish speakers." But that " there is no rejection of Catalan by either students or parents, " they remember, "they have accepted Catalan as the center's vehicle language."
It should be remembered that parents who students of the Balearic Islands, in the application to register their children to any center of the islands, whether agreed or not, have no option to choose the vehicle language in which they want their children to study. Everyone is obliged to mark a box in which they accept the vehicular language of the five centers to which they choose by order of preference, and even the one they have not chosen, if they finally have no place in any, and they are offered the that remain with vacant places.
Checking that box is a serious difficulty when taking legal measures for linguistic reasons against the center, or the Department of Education of the Government of the socialist Francina Armengol, ecosoberanistas and Podemos. In addition, not all centers have published their language project on their website, which requires parents to go to each of them to request it, although it is almost always written exclusively in Catalan. It should be noted that 55% of the Balearic population was not born on the islands , or that according to the latest study of the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), only 38.1% of young people in the Balearic Islands between 15 and 29 years old Identify Catalan as your first language .
For PLIS Education, the decision to use only Catalan as a vehicular language "is not justified by the Diocese for pedagogical or academic reasons, the only ones to be taken into account in an educational system, but only for nationalist ideological considerations , giving the Castilian , the mother tongue of most of the students of the diocesan schools, the same treatment as a foreign language ".
They also denounce that the discrimination of the Castilian takes to the relations with the parents, who will not have the right to receive any official communication, oral or written, in Spanish, "being content", in the words of the PLIS spokesperson, "with being graciously attended orally and in particular and in a corner, after humbly raising my hand and requesting clarifications in Spanish. " In fact, it is specified in the document published by the Bishopric: "When necessary or expressly requested, other languages will also be used for exclusively oral and private communications."
The professors of the PLIS denounce that "if the Church has among its Christian aims to attend to people and their needs, especially those of the most disadvantaged, it is not understood that they bet with a measure that treats Castilian-speaking parents as second-class citizens , who harms a good number of students, especially those who have learning difficulties and those of recent incorporation, and that prevents the Castilian from becoming a vehicle of high culture, because it is not necessary to ignore that a language that is not used as a vehicle in teaching from 3 to 18 years ends up being unfit for abstraction, for science and for high culture. " And they conclude, " Christianity is not said, it is practiced ."
From the Press Office of the Bishopric of Mallorca they have not wanted to make any assessment of these criticisms.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Balearics
- Education
- Majorca
- Balearic schools
- Catalonia
LanguageThe Andalusian Government 'to the cultural rescue' of Andalusians living in Catalonia
Spain Torrential rains and storms in the Valencian Community, Balearic Islands and Murcia
Basque Country Euskadi is the community with fewer students in public schools