Thousands demonstrate in defense of Catalan schooling

  • Strong response to call of SomEscola and demonstrate in front of the TSJC in Barcelona - They were protesting against court ruling requiring 25% of the classes in Spanish.

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10.02.2014 - 20:34

La premsa lliure no la paga el govern, la paguen els lectors


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Thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia this evening, responding to the convocation of Somescola.cat coalition to voice their opposition to the court ruling that required five schools to offer 25% of their classes in Spanish. After a speech by Marius Serra, they read a manifesto that warned that ‘this is the most serious attack that our schools have received since the Transition’ and insisted that ‘now more than ever’ we have to live by the motto ‘For a country that belongs to everyone, we need our schools in Catalan’. ‘We have to all work together. It’s a matter of democracy and of country. Our future swings in the balance.’

Somescola denounces that the court instructions are addressed directly to the directors of the affected schools, which ‘attacks the democratic legitimacy and the mandate of the Parliament of Catalonia’. For Somescola, the intent of the court is clear: ‘politicize the education system in order to achieve, through the legal system, the centralizing objectives that they seek’.

‘We give witness to the seriousness of a situation in which judges can go into our classrooms to decide the linguistic policy of our schools, going over the heads of the criteria and regulations that we have been constructing for the past 30 years, and which have been approved by a broad social consensus and by successive laws in the Parliament of Catalonia and applied in classrooms in accordance with the Linguistic Projects of the schools, approved by the Academic Council of each particular school,’ said the manifesto, in which Somescola also declared that the ‘spiraling siege to our educational system has grown to a point which no democratic country can accept’.

For all those reasons, Somescola firmly demands that the Ministry of Education firmly defend the current schooling model and ‘solidly back up’ the five directors threatened by the judges, ‘who have to know that they have their government and their country behind them’. And they also called for the collective defense of linguistic immersion and to ‘demonstrate that we will never consent to them destroying our Catalan educational system from the outside, nor that they disrupt the unity of the Catalan community, by encouraging an artificial conflict’.

Government appeal
The TSJC decision was roundly rejected by the Catalan Government, which has already presented an appeal. According to the appeal, the rulings violate the Spanish Constitution, the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, and the Catalan Education Law (LEC). The government warned, in addition, that the ruling would require that groups of children were separated by language and they registered their disagreement with the court’s jurisdiction in designating the percentage of Spanish to be used in the classroom.

One of the affected schools also made a public announcement against the TSJC ruling. In a letter, the Escola Pia of Catalonia pointed out that its centers ‘are rooted in the country and dedicated to its service’. The school continued, ‘We will do everything that we possibly can to be loyal to our commitment to make Catalan our language of instruction.’

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