The historian Jordi Font explained it very well yesterday in an article in El Punt Avui. It was the pedagogue Marta Mata, co-founder of the Rosa Sensat teachers' association, a Catalan Socialist (PSC) politician - member of the Catalan parliament, of the Spanish Congress, a Senator and Barcelona city councillor - who, in the early 80s debate on whether two parallel educational lines should be established in Catalan schools, one in the Catalan language and the other in Castilian (Spanish), backed the Escola Comuna (Common School) model by contrasting the so-called “parents' right to choose” with the “children's right to choose”.That is, in the latter case, the right of schoolchildren to have equal access to both languages so that they can then decide in life what use - or not - they would make of each. This is precisely the right, the right to choose, which belongs to the child, which in the first place the parents, but also after that, Spanish justice, the Supreme Court, in its job as language police force, and much of the political and media apparatus of the Spanish state, have violated and denied the child of Canet de Mar, whom they are supposedly trying to favour with 25% of classes in Spanish.
A ghost haunts Canet de Mar. It is the so-called "parents' right to choose", and the sickening statements about a supposedly-violated "liberty" of Castilian speakers in Catalonia, which gets to the point of regarding Catalans as though they are Nazis, something that the Popular Party (PP) does with impunity while others remain silent. If this is not remedied, it is this that could turn the child from Canet de Mar into an outsider among his P5 classmates. Not just this child but the entire class are victims of the same political, judicial and media offensive against a system, that of 100% linguistic immersion in the Catalan language, now cut back by 25%, which had been designed to guarantee the "right to choose" for the children themselves, not for their parents, who in this case not only made their own choices long before, but also want to impose their choice on the rest of humanity with the arms of an entire state behind them. You don't have to be an Einstein to see that, in fact, it is not the parents of the kid from Canet who decide: in reality, it is the sinister spectre of the former Spanish education minister Wert who haunts the schools of the beautiful Maresme town in order to "Spanishize" boys and girls with 25% Castilian like it or not.
It is the sinister spectre of the former Spanish education minister Wert who haunts the schools of the beautiful Maresme town in order to "Spanishize" boys and girls with 25% Castilian like it or not.
The umpteenth attempt to open a language war in Catalonia that 99% of the people do not want is apparently paradoxical, and not only because Castilian clearly continues to be the privileged language in Catalonia - just try living only in Catalan or only in Castilian and then come and tell me to what extent it is possible to do so in each case. The paradox, apparent, arrives because, on the one hand, the attack takes place in a framework of evident stagnation if not regression in the use of Catalan, to the benefit of Castilian, starting with the teachers in the classrooms; and, on the other hand, in the more strictly political field, the retreat, if not the complete failure, of the Catalan independence process as we have known it so far. A politically weakened position which the strategy of a party like the PSC contributes to: the Catalan Socialists historically identified themselves with linguistic immersion and coexistence, and are now condescending or supposedly neutral purely for electoral interests - their final move in retaking control of the orphaned unionist vote that had been lost to Ciudadanos (Cs).
But this double paradox ceases to be so if we look at the relationship between, on the one hand, the offensive against immersion and the weakening of the use and social prestige of the Catalan language and, on the other, the sensation of defeat in the combat against the ultra-homogenizing and repressive Spanish state which has been unmasked by the independence process. The fact that, in addition, the language ruling by the High Court of Catalonia took place right in the middle of negotiations between the Republican Left (ERC) and the Pedro Sánchez government on the presence of Catalan on audiovisual platforms in exchange for ERC support for the Spanish budget - which has so far been shown to be a confidence trick of huge proportions - is a vivid reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of each side. For this reason, Catalanism could lose the last battle for the language if it accepts the discourse that Catalan is inevitably heading for extinction and that the independence project, far from strengthening the language, weakens it because it divides society.
The situation of Catalan is not to blame for the “failure” of linguistic immersion as an egalitarian and inclusive pedagogical tool - no, the level of social use of Catalan, which is low and in decline, should certainly not be confused with the level of knowledge of the language (extended across the vast majority of the population), nor for the supposed "fractures" - social, political, identity-based, ethnolinguistic or, whatever you like to call them - attributed to the independence process. The Manifesto of the 2,300 against the Catalan government's language policy, promoted among others by the ineffable Federico Jiménez Losantos in 1981; the campaigns disguised as bilingualism that mobilized part of the vote of Barcelona's Socialist-voting red belt to switch allegiances to the PP of Aleix Vidal-Quadras in the 90s; or the creation of the party Ciutadans / Ciutadanos by Albert Rivera in July 2006 - accompanied by another uprising by Spanish intellectuals, among them Felix de Azúa, Albert Boadella, Francesc de Carreras and Arcadi Espada - all of this happened well before the events of the independence movement got rolling: the 9-N consultation in 2014, the October 2017 referendum and declaration of independence, the prison sentences totalling 100 years, not to mention the thousands of people who still face court proceedings for defending the right to self-determination of Catalonia - everyone knows who they are. We have not seen any prosecutors or court act ex officio against Cs leaders Arrimadas or Carrizosa for inciting hatred by cutting down yellow ribbons or calling directly for the imprisonment of political leaders democratically elected by the people who have been persecuted for trying to comply with their electoral manifestos, in which, incidentally, the question of language in Catalonia was not a priority, as it has not been, in general, in the independence process roadmap.
Catalanism and the cause of the language will lose if they fall into the trap of equating four sectarian and offensive tweets with the strength of an entire state activated to reconquer a school in a town in Catalonia as if we were back in 1939.
The PP's deputy secretary of organization, Ana Beltrán, asked last Saturday: "What still remains for us to see? Will we get to see, in Catalonia, those who ask for the possibility of studying in Spanish wearing marked bracelets, so that they can be pointed out in the street, as the Nazis did with the Jews?" Catalanism and the cause of the language will lose if they fall into the trap of equating four sectarian and offensive tweets such as those dedicated to the family and the child of Canet de Mar with the strength of an entire state activated to reconquer a school in a town in Catalonia as if we were back in 1939. Who is promoting an apartheid? Who wants to create a linguistic bantustan? Who is building walls and boundaries of identities? Who is balkanizing the schools here? The Nazi will be you, madam.
The moment is crucial, even if it sounds like a cliché, precisely because Catalan is less fashionable than ever socially and culturally and now there is no independence process underway: the charge of collective empowerment that the independence cycle provided is now deactivated by repression, fatigue, and political mismanagement. Can the Canet case be used to reactivate the civic and Catalanist mobilization and (re)make the country’s consensus over the language? Maybe yes. But - as has happened in the audiovisual negotiation in Madrid - it could also serve to reinforce the neo-autonomist agenda, in which the eternal promise of guaranteeing the survival and health of the Catalan language always returns after each new hammer blow by those who want or who promote the opposite: to destroy it, annihilate it, to put an end to the "anomaly" of its mere and cherished existence.