Venomous tongue

Spain’s Ministry of Education's attempts to put an end to Catalonia’s successful model of schooling

Esther Vera
3 min
Verinosa llengua

Editor-in-chief"Juan, we wont be writting you. We dunno how to in Catalan an it feals silley in Spanish. We'll call you an talk on the phone insted". This was the first and only letter from a mother schooled during the Franco regime to her son, who had left home to study on an Erasmus program. All Catalans know similar anecdotes about the difficulties that our language has had in acquiring the status of a normal language in a dysfunctional nation. We all know of anecdotes like that of a Valencian whose parents made an effort to speak to him in Spanish, and when he spoke up for his own language they asked him, surprised: "How far do you think Valencian will get you? Forty miles?" Obviously, the natural direction was inland, towards Madrid. That wasn't so long ago.

Many Catalans are also surrounded, in my case up to the neck, with Spanish-speaking parents and grandparents who learned the language out of love and respect for this nation, and who learned that Catalan, like education, were key instruments for cohesion, as well as individual and collective progress; that the knowledge of a language and the practice of bilingualism were opportunities for growth.

Thus, fighting for the recovery of the Catalan language, for its normalization, and understanding it as a cohesive element, we arrived together to the 21st Century.

Catalan as it is spoken and written today owes much to Pompeu Fabra, and for this reason this Sunday's paper will take a moment to pay homage to him, to play and learn with the figure of the engineer who did chemistry with words, to the point of leaving us a tidy, living language as an inheritance.

Catalan schools have accomplished much during the last few decades. The language immersion model has succeeded in giving children a proficiency in Spanish similar to students in the rest of Spain, while also mastering the Catalan language. The latter is a minority language in the reality of the world that surrounds us, despite the lies told about the alleged grievances suffered by Spanish.

That's why this week's alert level is at maximum. Spain’s Ministry of Education's attempts to put an end to Catalonia’s successful model of schooling by taking advantage of Article 155's intervention in home rule is an example of a disloyalty without limits that seeks to impose a political project of uniformity. In their political race to lure Spanish neo-nationalists, PP and Ciudadanos are more concerned with dismantling the school system than with guaranteeing quality and excellence. They are more concerned with mining anti-Catalan sentiment and teaching independence supporters a lesson than with reflecting on the quality of democracy in Spain, the stubborn diversity, and the risks to the economy and medium-term investments generated by instability and ineffectiveness in the management of public affairs.

This is how democracy dies

Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argue in their book How Democracies Die that "history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes", and conclude that "the promise of history is that we might find the rhymes before it's too late". They argue that democracies don't usually succumb due to a catastrophic event, like a military coup d’état, but rather because of a gradual weakening of leading institutions, such as the judicial system or the press. From their thesis you can deduce that a country is only as strong as its institutions and that "democratic erosion can be practically imperceptible" to public opinion. The regime, they say, "doesn't cross any red lines towards dictatorship", and the social warning alarms never sound "because there is no specific moment at which we can speak of the suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law".

Levitsky and Ziblatt warn that attempts to subvert democracy can be "legal", in the sense that they are approved by the legislature and accepted by the courts. They can even be disguised as efforts to improve democracy while the press looks on, besieged or censorsing itself. The book, recently published in the USA, is a response to many Americans' worries about the deterioration of the public sphere under the Trump presidency. But the reading sounds uncomfortably like current-day Spain.

In Catalonia it is urgent that we recover our institutions, which today are infiltrated by the Spanish administration. The mood of Catalonia’s public employees mostly swings between collaboration to avoid paralysis and outrage. Decisions are made by the Spanish government with the political criteria of a party that has only 4 representatives in the Catalan Parliament and is in direct electoral competition in Spain with Ciudadanos, a party that was born with the single objective of putting an end to language immersion and homogenizing Spain. The Spanish government has no intention of updating the Pact of the Transition, and if it did, it would be to wipe the slate clean and not to respect diversity. The longer it takes us to recover the Generalitat, the more irreversible the damage to home-rule will be.

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