Alejandro Tercero, 12/5/2020
Miquel Iceta, first secretary of the PSC / EUROPA PRESS
The initial text that advocates multilingualism receives a dozen amendments that will be debated and voted on in the congress next week.
A dozen PSC groups have presented amendments that reject the proposal put forward by the party leadership in the political presentation to “make more flexible” the compulsory school language immersion system exclusively in Catalan that is applied in Catalan public schools.
The opposition to establishing a bilingual model comes from the socialist groups of L’Hospitalet Sud (Barcelona), Girona, Eixample (Barcelona), Sabadell (Barcelona), Castelldefels (Barcelona), Tarragona, Reus (Tarragona) and Granollers (Barcelona), as well as La Joventut Socialista de Catalunya (JSC).
In defense of immersion
The text that will be debated and voted on in the socialist congress of the next 13, 14 and 15 proposed to make “linguistic diversity in Catalonia an asset, defending Catalan and Spanish through a multilingual model in school with the flexibility that the sociolinguistic reality present in our country demands “.
Several of the amendments presented claim to include the term “immersion” in the presentation and to defend the current monolingual school model. “We will continue to support and defend linguistic immersion, the model that has guaranteed the success and coexistence of the two languages in our country, being a commitment to freedom, equality and social inclusion”, indicate the socialist youth. Others criticize the independence movement and the conservative forces for making a “partisan use” of the language and express the will of the PSC to avoid any initiative that could contribute to the language division.
A proposal against immersion
However, there is also some amendment that opts for the opposite option. Specifically, one from L’Hospitalet de Llobregat that asks that the use of Catalan as a vehicular language be a “voluntary” option.
This proposal warns of the “conscientious desire to make the Spanish language disappear, the majority in the popular classes” shown by some sectors.
The experts, with the direction
The party leadership has advocated “making more flexible” the model that is currently applied and has appealed to a 2018 document signed by the Minister of Education of the Generalitat, Josep Bargalló, in which it is proposed that the centers should have take into account their “own sociolinguistic context, that of their environment, the linguistic background of the students and their individual needs”, when drawing their linguistic project.
Various experts in this field have positively valued the proposal by the PSC management. The main pro-bilingualism entities, on the other hand, have shown their doubts about the possibility of the initial text being approved at the congress next week.
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