22% of supporters of the independence of Catalonia reject language immersion

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• Education: Every time that Isabel Celaá defended that the Generalitat complied with Spanish in the classrooms

The nationalists repeat the mantra that there is consensus in Catalan society on the linguistic model in teaching and say that it makes no sense to debate it, much less change it.

That is why they hardly publish studies on the uses of Spanish in the classroom.

"The Catalan school is not touched", they warn, warning that anyone who wants to introduce a minimum reflection on an unusual reality around the world is an enemy of the majority.

But then the empirical evidence shows

that this agreement is not such and that it is not true that Catalan families do not want more

Spanish

for their children at school.

Even among the independentistas there is a

22%

who does not agree with the immersion and would like Spanish to have more weight.In addition, among the supporters of secessionism, the

38%

is in favor of parents choosing the language in which their children learn.

And there is a

41%

which defends that children should start school in their mother tongue, be it Catalan or Spanish.

The data come from

Language policy in the Catalan school system

, a study of teachers

Roberto Garvía

(

University Carlos III of Madrid

) and

Andres Santana

(

Autonomous University of Madrid

) based on a 2016 survey of

2,200

residents of Catalonia. "It makes all the sense in the world," explains Santana.

“A person may want immersion for others but then, for their children, seek the best so that they learn to handle themselves in a competitive environment.

You have to be

very politicized

so you don't want your children to study Spanish or English.

The leaders of nationalism have shown us this, by not sending their children to schools that are based on the immersion system, "emphasizes this professor of Political Science. The work of Santana and Garvía -which is known in academic jargon for the abbreviated name of

LingPolCat

- is one of the few that addresses the taboo subject of the language in Catalan schools.

Almost all - except for one who published

The vanguard

in 2013- come to the same conclusion: citizens are not satisfied with the current system of linguistic immersion, whereby it is only taught in Spanish

Language and literature

and the rest of the subjects are taught in Catalan.

Six out of 10 want a trilingual system

This is also indicated by the survey that

posted yesterday

the Asociation

Catalan Civil Society (SCC)

.

Your survey, conducted by the company

GAD3

, does not go into the detail of the political orientation of his

1,000

respondents, but concludes that only the

9%

of the Catalans endorse the immersion.

For decades the

Generalitat

has relied on the fact that Catalan was in danger to impose this model, but current Catalan society is actually multilingual, not monolingual, because, in the case of the SCC survey,

64%

would like a trilingual system -with Spanish, Catalan and English-, while the

twenty-one%

defends bilingual learning in which Spanish and Catalan are taught in a similar proportion.

While, according to the LingPolCat, they do not reach the

5%

residents in Catalonia who want an education with less than 10% of the hours in Spanish.

On the contrary, they are not very numerous either: less than 5% are in favor of classrooms with less than 10% of classes in Catalan. So, what would the Catalan school have to be in an ideal world?

Six out of 10 consider that, to begin with, the first language of educational contact should be that of the parents, a proportion that drops to

fifty%

in the case of the LingPolCat survey and which, in any case, leaves in evidence the decision of the Generalitat to refuse to recognize this right, protected by the

Unesco

and state legislation. «The results indicate that there is no consensus.

Nor do they point to an opposition in two blocks that have everything very clear.

Rather there are three blocks ", interprets Santana.

It is the same that emphasizes

Fernando Sanchez Costa

, president of SCC: «The official discourse that we have lived through for 40 years in Catalonia does not correspond at all with the voice of the citizens.

The Government throws that voice, but it does not represent the feelings of the majority of Catalans.

25% or more?

Last week, the

Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia

(TJSC)

ruled

that the Generalitat should immediately guarantee at least one

25%

of Spanish in all schools, the equivalent of one more core subject in addition to Language and Literature.

Does this percentage represent the feelings of the majority of citizens? According to Sánchez Costa, «the vast majority would accept a minimum agreement with at least 25% Catalan and at least 25% Spanish and give a margin of freedom to calibrate in each area a combination of Spanish and Catalan. ”Both surveys conclude that society wants there to be more Catalan than the rest of the languages, but not for it to monopolize schools like now.

According to the LingPolCat survey, the chosen distribution of teaching hours would be the following: in Primary, a

43.9%

in Catalan, a

28.6%

in English and a

27.5%

in Spanish;

in Secondary, a

41.9%

in Catalan, a

31.2%

in English and a

26.9%

The curious thing is that, in the case of the pro-independence interviewees, who have made many fuss in public in reaction to the ruling, the percentages of Catalan with whom they would conform are not much higher:

52.9%

in Primary and

50.6%

in Secondary.

Despite the fact that they define themselves as secessionists, they accept 21% of the hours in Spanish and the rest in English.

They would not strictly comply with what is imposed by the TSJC, but they would stay very close. Nor are there very exaggerated differences between the voters of the different parties.

"Everyone wants a certain presence of both languages," Santana summarizes.

The data reveal that, between

37.5%

hours in Spanish that the supporters of the

PP

and the

20.3%

of the followers of

ERC

, there is room to understand each other and reach a middle ground.

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