Victor Mondelo Barcelona

Barcelona

Updated Sunday, February 11, 2024-01:33

  • Catalonia The Ombudsman elected by the independentists warns the Generalitat for denying attention in Spanish

  • Catalonia The schools in Catalonia that pressure teachers not to change languages: "If the family speaks to you in Spanish, respond in Catalan!"

Under pressure from the

Generalitat

, public schools in

Catalonia

are subjecting their teachers to a bombardment of linguistic surveys to test the operation and results of immersion. And to find the reasons that explain the decline in the use of Catalan that they claim to have detected among students despite being forced to study according to a monolingual model that reduces classes in Spanish to a minimum.

As EL MUNDO has been able to verify, the forms that the school management sends to teachers sometimes exude an evident nationalist bias and include statements that question the freedom of schoolchildren to use their mother tongue, which portray the Spanish-speaking students as worse students or who link immigration with worsening results of linguistic immersion.

An example is the questionnaire sent to the teachers of the

El Calamot Institute

, in the Barcelona town of

Gavà

. When asking teachers about "the obstacles they have encountered in the classroom so that students who do not have sufficient command of Catalan can advance in the acquisition of the language", the first response option is: "The students consider that they have the right to express themselves in Spanish in subjects. An assertion with which the center assumes that such a right does not exist or, at the very least, that it represents an obstacle for the linguistic immersion model to have its assimilative effect.

Another questionnaire from a Barcelona center - whose name we omit at the request of the teacher who had to answer it and who fears reprisals from his superiors - asks teachers to identify "what are the main changes detected in the linguistic landscape of the center in recent years" and offers as one of the possible answers the following statement: "There is a certain explicit rejection of Catalan (even on the part of good students)." With this note, the school management distinguishes between good and bad students and suggests that the students who demonstrate the worst academic performance are those who are most opposed to the use of Catalan.

When asked by this newspaper about this controversial differentiation between students, the

Department of Education

of the Generalitat of Catalonia claims that "the response proposals are the decision of the center" and "considers that this comment should not have been included in any way." because it is inadequate and does not correspond to the proposed analysis objectives.

The same form indicates that, "for obvious reasons", "newly arrived students" may constitute one of "the difficulties that the teacher has encountered in maintaining Catalan as a vehicular and communication language."

«The plan to promote Catalan in educational centers exudes the usual totalitarian, classist and reactionary smell of all the educational policies of nationalist governments. Spanish-speaking students are problematic, bad students and a thorn in the side of the system. A replica on the linguistic issue of the Department's response to the disastrous results of the international PISA tests, which it blamed without hesitation on immigrant students. On that occasion, they only needed to say 'it's the fault of foreigners and those who speak Spanish,'" considers

Carlos Silva

, spokesperson for the

Free Teachers

platform .

It is worth remembering that the Generalitat initially attributed the poor results obtained by Catalonia in PISA to the "overrepresentation" in those tests of students from other territories. Subsequently, and in the face of the media and social commotion generated, the Minister of Education of the Government,

Anna Simó

, dismissed the president of the

Higher Evaluation Council

,

Carles Vega

, for being responsible for the interpretation of the data that led to making that discriminatory reading. .

The bath of reality that the ERC Government suffered with the PISA results - it was the autonomy that experienced the greatest collapse, falling to the national caboose by only surpassing five of the regions - does not alter its fixation to shield and even harden the immersion and, therefore, cornering Spanish.

This week, in response to the need to alleviate the "overload" of diagnostic tests that students must face throughout the course and the alteration of curricular planning that entails, the Department of Education announced that it was "exceptionally" canceling compression evaluations oral in Catalan to which students in the sixth year of Primary (12 years old) and 4th year of ESO (16 years old) are subjected, but the pressure from the pro-independence environment and, especially from

Junts

, led the counselor Anna Simó to maintain them, despite the fact that PISA highlights a failure in Mathematics, Science and Reading Comprehension.

«It is a shame that education is in the hands of such sectarian people. Continuous reporting of these abuses is essential. It's our only tool to stop them. For this reason, from Free Teachers we encourage all Primary and Secondary teachers to report these situations. "Fear and silence are your best ally," alleges Silva, the visible face of the constitutionalist entity, who in December conveyed this same opinion to the MEPs who made up the EU mission to analyze the effects of linguistic immersion.