More than 35,000 people, mostly independentists from the Spanish region of Catalonia, demonstrated this Saturday to defend an education only in Catalan, with the participation of the main regional authorities.
The mobilization was called by the Somescola platform as a reaction to the judicial decisions that force several Catalan schools to teach, at the request of some families, at least 25% of the classes in Spanish.
The most recent has generated a great social and political controversy in Spain and a strong malaise in the Catalan sovereignist movement.
The government of Catalonia, formed by a coalition of pro-independence, as well as nationalist parties and social organizations responded angrily in this last case, parents from Canet de Mar (province of Barcelona) to whom the courts recently recognized their son’s right to receive 25% of the classes in Spanish.
The Spanish right urged that the sentence be carried out and once again accused the president of the Executive, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, of giving in to the Catalan independence movement; Conservatives, liberals and the extreme right called the situation linguistic “apartheid” in Catalonia.
This autonomous region has political powers in education and years ago implemented a model called “linguistic immersion”, with Catalan as the vehicular language of teaching, except in the Spanish language subject.
According to the Spanish Constitution, Castilian is the official language of the State and all Spaniards have “the duty to know it and the right to use it”.
The other Spanish languages (in this case Catalan in Catalonia) are also official in the respective autonomous communities (regions) in accordance with their statutes of autonomy.
The protesters toured the city of Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, with the slogan “Ara i semper, l’escola en català” (“Now and forever, the school in Catalan).
The president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, and the president of the regional Parliament, Laura Borràs, among other political leaders and social leaders attended.
Aragonès assured that these sentences and what he considers attacks against linguistic immersion are an “offensive by Spanish nationalism, which wants to use Catalan schools” to undermine the social cohesion of Catalonia.
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