Catalan education sector protests against Spanish quota in the classrooms

Thousands of teachers and students went on strike on Wednesday to urge the Catalan education ministry not to impose a ruling by Spain’s Supreme Court. The court decision confirmed 25% of teaching must be given in Spanish across Catalonia’s public and semi-public schools. For decades, the unanimously adoptd language ‘immersion system’ in Catalonia has assured that Catalan has been the only working language in schools, giving students a complete command of both Catalan and Spanish when they graduate, as Spanish is more widely used in society.

According to the Catalan government, the strike was observed by 6.49% of workers in public schools, and 4.21% of those in private education centers. However, this information was only counting data from 56% of schools so far. This is the fourth day of strikes in two weeks for the education sector, as from March 15 to 17, teachers and students also protested against some planned changes in Catalan schools. There, demonstrations were focused on urging authorities not to apply a new academic year calendar and a new school curriculum.

The protests on Wednesday were organized by education entities such as the USTEC teachers union or Sindicat d’Estudiants dels Països Catalans (SEPC), a left-wing pro-independence students’ union. “The strike is to defend a public education system that is 100% in the Catalan language as the only way to reassure the survival of our language,” organizations said.

Government will not implement ruling

“Language learning is not about quotas, but about teaching,” Catalan education minister Josep González-Cambray reaffirmed on Tuesday, only three days before the deadline to implement the Supreme Court ruling establishing that 25% of all classes in schools should be taught in Spanish. In response to this judicial decision – which Cambray stated schools need not heed – the government will issue a language policy decree for schools after gauging Catalan residents’ opinions through an open participatory process.

The Spanish Supreme Court ruled on November 23, 2021 against the immersion system in Catalonia. The education method has been in place in schools since 1983, to strengthen the use of the language. The goal of this education policy in public and semi-public schools is for students to be proficient in both languages. Most of Catalonia’s students go to these kinds of schools; private ones, on the other hand, are exempt from implementing the immersion system.

The immersion system was implemented for students to learn Catalan as the Spanish language has a bigger presence due to pop culture, cinema, television channels, court rulings, and other day-to-day activities, in which people tend to favor the language in certain settings. Catalan speakers often switch to Spanish without hesitation when speaking with people who talk to them in Spanish, and some Catalan speakers even talk to other Catalan speakers in Spanish sometimes.