While many protests took place on Saturday, the issue of regional languages took on a national dimension.
At the heart of the debates, immersive teaching.
Like many elected officials from several regions, François Bayrou said this week that “immersive” schools were in “danger of death”.
He reacts as a fervent defender of Béarnais, spoken in his department.
Emmanuel Macron spoke on this subject after the censorship by the Constitutional Council on Friday of immersive education in regional languages.
To ensure that the latter would be maintained.
Jean Castex, speaker of Catalan, for his part announced that he was assigning two deputies on this subject.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, him, became the hated character of the centralizing Jacobin in the eyes of Paul Molac, the Breton deputy who had carried the law.
The subject is hot with the approach of the regional ones.
Read also: Regional languages: François Bayrou protests against their censorship by the Constitutional Council
But if the debate is flourishing, it is above all symbolic and ideological.
Barely 200 to 300 final year students take their baccalaureate each year after completing their education in an immersive establishment, which organizes most of the school time in a regional language.
A handful of students from the Lycée Diwan systematically demand, on this occasion, to present their mathematics test in Breton, which the Ministry of Education refuses to them just as dryly.
An old habit ...
Around 15,000 students in France
In addition to a hundred high school graduates at Diwan high school in Caraix for Breton and around a hundred students at Bernat Etxepare high school in Bayonne for Basque, there are three or four pupils at Calandreta Léon Cordas high school in Montpellier for Occitan. That is just about everything. Almost all of the students enrolled in “immersive” establishments are in fact in nursery and primary. There are around 15,000, especially in the Basque Country and Brittany, a little less in the South and hardly any in Corsica. These are private establishments under contract, financed by the State, but often with financial participation from families.
National education also finances the schooling of some 500 immersion students in Basque “experimental” nursery schools.
If the demand from families is "strong" assure the promoters of regional languages, it is clear that the number of students enrolled in these structures has remained stable and residual for fifteen years compared to some 12 million students. French.
Of course, funding is difficult to find, but the organization of schooling can also seem confusing in the eyes of parents.
Very good results in the bac
Children often have no education in French before the CE1 class.
When they are in college, they can take their history or mathematics lessons in Breton or Basque, etc.
Defenders of this type of education promote the benefits of bilingualism and the very good results of their students in the bac, which they nevertheless take in French.
Their detractors, in the rectorates, retort that the families who enroll their offspring there come from rather affluent or intellectual-militant backgrounds and that this is therefore not surprising.
"False!
We receive a lot of middle and popular classes.
The elites prefer bilingual in English ”
, assure the establishments.
No statistics
In the absence of statistics, it is difficult to decide. Some families are attracted by this rediscovery of their often forgotten regional language, but others are just as seduced by the results or by the attractive pedagogy provided in these schools. Calendreta, for example, are inspired by the Freinet pedagogy. The stake for the defenders of regional languages, it is not so much that these immersive private schools which accomodate only a minority of pupils, that the general one.
"What is the point of providing immersive education in the middle of an Occitan-speaking desert?"
, asks one of them. Public schools that are bilingual or provide an option in a regional language reach many more pupils, around 400,000, although in high schools less than 7,000 pupils study a regional language as an option. It has become very difficult to find teachers capable of teaching these languages, which are always less studied at university. The number of candidates is generally lower than the needs