Spain Passes Contested Education Bill
Madrid, Dec 23 (AFP/APP): Spain’s upper house of parliament approved Wednesday a controversial education reform bill which removes a stipulation that Spanish must be the main language in classrooms across the nation.
The measure was included in the bill at the request of Catalan separatist party ERC, whose support is needed by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority government to pass legislation at national level. The ERC helped approve Sanchez’s 2021 budget on Tuesday in the Senate, prompting accusations from the main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) that Sanchez was now “paying the price” with the education law reform.
“The price is throwing Spanish out the window of classroom in Catalonia forever,” the party’s spokesman in the senate, Javier Maroto, said ahead of the vote.
Spain’s regional languages were suppressed under the 1939-1975 dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the issue remains hugely sensitive — particularly in Catalonia, a northeastern region home to some 7.5 million people. After Spain returned to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, education became the responsibility of its regions — including those like Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country that have their own languages with equal status under the law.
As a result, in wealthy Catalonia classes in public schools have for decades been taught in Catalan, with only two hours a week in most cases set aside to learn Spanish. A previous PP government tried to change this by reforming Spain’s education law in 2013 to include a reference that Spanish is the language of instruction of the nation’s schools. But in practice the reference was ignored and classes continued to be delivered mainly in Catalan in the region.
The Catalan nationalists who govern the region argue this policy is needed to protect the language and say that, even four decades after Franco, it remains vulnerable. Sanchez has defended the bill, saying it reflected Spain’s “linguistic plurality” which he said was a “huge asset to society as a whole”.
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