The Catalan Executive will explain its rejection of the mandatory percentages of use of Catalan and Spanish in schools and institutes
The Government of the Generalitat plans to approve today the decree that intends to shield Catalan in the classrooms. The Executive thus opts for the decree route and not wait for the parliamentarian, as had initially been proposed. For this the ‘president’ Pere Aragones It will urgently meet its ‘consellers’ to carry out a rule of scarcely drafted and that is limited to making explicit the rejection of the percentages of one and another language in the classrooms. It will come into force before may 31 in order to avoid the deadline imposed by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC).
The meeting will take place at half past twelve in the morning and the rule would be published in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat de Catalunya (DOGC) the following day. Its content is the result of the consensus between ERC, Junts, PSC and ‘comuns’ and aims to shield Catalan as a vehicular language, granting Castilian the status of “curriculum” and avoiding setting minimum percentages for the use of either of them.
The Government will not wait for its Consell Executiu every Tuesday and they anticipate a day to draw up a rule that must be approved and in force before May 31. What is the deadline imposed by the TSJC to comply with its sentence that sets the 25% Spanish in the classrooms. Those of Aragonès intend to save with this decree the stumbling block of the high Catalan magistrates, since the law on linguistic uses that they intended to process first in Parliament is pending the opinion of the Council of Statutory Guarantees, after Vox, C’s and PP resorted to it in order to delay its approval. Said resolution may not arrive until Thursday of next week and the Government has decided not to play it and first approve the decree rejecting the percentages and then process the law of uses. His initial intention was to first approve the law of uses and then the decree against the percentages.
The will of the decree that the Government will approve is to make explicit a rejection of the imposition of percentages of languages in education. According to the same, Catalan will be the language “normally used”, but Spanish “must be guaranteed an adequate presence in the study plans”, picks up the agreement reached between the four formations. Always guaranteeing that “all students reach oral and written command of the two official languages”.
Another novelty that the decree will introduce is in relation to the role of the Department of Education. This will be erected as the authority that will give the go-ahead to the linguistic projects of the schools, a way of exempting the directors of the centers and, therefore, protecting them from any action that the justice system may take in the future. And these projects will be in one or another language depending “exclusively” on the “pedagogical criteria and in a singular way for each one of the educational centers”.
New decree and new law
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And said decree rejecting the percentages will be followed by that law that is now at the expense of the Consell de Garanties. It seeks a new rule “on the use and learning of the official languages in non-university education”, so the language policy law will not be reformed and there will be some changes with respect to the agreement reached on March 24. Said content groups “almost 80% of Parliament”, as they have emphasized from ERC during the negotiations.
The negotiation for the Catalan law in the classroom has not been without shocks and moments of tension between the parties in recent months. The Junts post-convergents stood outside the agreement at times, endangering its viability and issuing an ultimatum last week that ultimately had no consequences. However, the four formations have ended up shielding a consensus that will have a first expression in the extraordinary Consell Executiu this Monday.