16 years ago it was a rarity to see a Spanish politician speaking in English on television.
Esperanza Aguirre, then president of the Community of Madrid, did so when she sat down for 25 minutes with the well-known presenter and English teacher Richard Vaughan.
The purpose of the interview, in February 2008, was for Aguirre to talk about one of her flags, bilingual education in public and charter schools, which she had launched four years earlier, shortly after coming to regional power.
Until then, the English language was used in classrooms as a separate subject, but Aguirre replaced Spanish with English when teaching natural sciences, history or geography.
It was a revolution in Spanish public education that excited not only Madrid parents, but also those responsible for other autonomous communities (left and right) who followed Aguirre's example.
The American Vaughan, who settled in Spain in 1974, highlighted when presenting Aguirre that steps were finally being taken to solve the problem of the Spanish with English.
The president said that she had learned English thanks to going to a British school in Madrid until she was 11 years old.
“Those years were very, very important for me,” she stressed.
“It has been very useful and that is why I believe that it is my duty as president of the people of Madrid and responsible for the education of the people of Madrid to promote bilingual education here in Madrid, not only for parents who can pay for private schools.”
Now, a political heir to Aguirre, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has questioned that legacy, the “achievement” of which the former president was most proud.
Ayuso's Education Minister caused a big surprise to the Madrid educational community in December when he announced at an informative breakfast that he was going to eliminate the teaching of History and Geography in English.
“We have analyzed that, when studying History in English, what often occurs is a detriment, a decline, both in History and in English,” said the counselor, Emilio Viciana.
His statement contradicted everything positive that the Community had said about the bilingual program for 20 years.
Successive Madrid governments, all from the PP, have boasted about this pioneering program and have highlighted exactly the opposite of what Viciana had said: that the level of English was improving without harming the acquisition of other knowledge.
According to the order whose content EL PAÍS announced last week, next year Spanish will return in Primary Social Sciences, in Geography and History in Compulsory Secondary School, as well as in History of Spain and History of the Contemporary World in Baccalaureate.
To boast about bilingualism, the Community had pointed out for years that university entrance grades were similar between students who followed the bilingual program and those who did not, and had also highlighted that in the annual evaluation of the English level the vast majority reached the expected goal.
However, Viciana turned the wheel without citing a single piece of information.
She limited herself to ensuring that the OECD has detected a deterioration in the teaching of History in some European countries.
This unexpected turn has not been due to a lack of demand.
Official figures prove that the program remains popular: since bilingualism started in the 2004-05 academic year, schools have gradually joined, as long as the faculty and the school's School Council voted in favor.
The implementation has grown markedly year after year.
In 2009/10 there were 43,572 students in this model and last year the figure had risen to 422,862.
This means that almost half of the 1,029,697 public and subsidized students (from kindergarten to secondary school) follow this system.
However, the enthusiasm of the Aguirre era has faded, giving way to a strong division between parents and teachers.
Bilingualism has been parodied on television and in cinema (Before her
Science exam, Santiago's daughter
in
Padre no hay más que uno
recited the parts of a plant in exquisite English, but responded strangely when her father asked her if she knew what the stem was
).
Contributing to this mockery was the grammatical mistake that the Aguirre Government committed in an advertising campaign called
Yes, we want,
instead of
Yes, we do
.
Criticism was also added by intellectuals such as the writer Javier Marías, who called the bilingual programs crazy: “Those in charge of the classes are not, however, with some exceptions, native British or American or Australian or Irish, but rather individuals from Langreo, Orihuela. , Requena, Conil or Mejorada del Campo who are supposed to master that language,” Marías wrote in this newspaper in 2015.
In the last five years, an organized opposition of concerned parents and frustrated teachers began, demonstrating under the slogan “Stop bilingualism.”
On YouTube, the documentary
La botched of bilingualism,
prepared by a Madrid professor,
It has accumulated more than 56,000 views since it was published in 2020. And last year, the Acción Educativa association published a survey that showed that the vast majority of Madrid teachers surveyed consider that teaching subjects in English reduces the depth of the content (81% ) and reduces comprehension (87%).
Concentration of critics of the bilingualism program in Madrid in 2021 in the center of the capital in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Education of Madrid. JUAN BARBOSA
Has this growing rejection influenced the Community?
Nobody knows how to explain it.
The regional government has not provided quantitative evidence to support its claim about the “detriment” suffered by students.
In a written response, a spokesperson for Viciana says about the reasons that “it is not a change in the program, but rather to reinforce bilingualism and the teaching of History in accordance with what has been learned in these years.”
He adds that “since the bilingual program was implemented 20 years ago, society has changed and so have the needs.”
The reform came in Ayuso's electoral program for May 2023, although then it went almost unnoticed: "History will be taught in Spanish in both primary and secondary schools in bilingual educational centers in the Community of Madrid," said one of its promises. , without providing more details.
Before that, it is difficult to find clues.
Viciana's predecessor, Enrique Ossorio, had defended the bilingual program tooth and nail against critics: “Bilingualism is the great advance that education has had in the Community of Madrid and in Spain in recent years,” he said in 2020. “The more English you study, the better results you get.”
The Bilingual Teaching Association, which has made public its indignation with the change, is chaired by Xavier Gisbert, former head of the bilingual program during Aguirre's time.
Gisbert.
At the beginning of the month, Gisbert met with senior officials from the Ministry of Education and assures that “they did not give a single argument” for the reform.
“The only reason is that it was in the electoral program.”
Aguirre, who has also expressed his disagreement, responds to this newspaper that his program has been a “success.”
He claims to not know the reasons of those responsible for the Ayuso Government, but believes that they have not made an adequate evaluation and may have been influenced by a textbook published in the United Kingdom that, he says, shows the History of Spain in a negative way: “In one was the whole black legend.”
The head of education at CCOO-Madrid, Isabel Galvín, has a critical view of the bilingual program, but also agrees with Aguirre on the lack of evaluation of this change.
However, in her case she thinks that Ayuso is not improvising.
“Ayuso leads a cultural war and its axis is Spanish ultranationalism,” she says.
“It was too big a contradiction to translate the names of the Catholic Monarchs.”
The reform has fueled an already heated debate about the impact of bilingualism.
Supporters and detractors cite data and studies with different meanings about teaching in English.
Apparently the performance figures agree with the former.
Students from bilingual centers obtained a better grade in the university entrance tests in 2021 (6.96 in the section, with a greater load in English, and 6.21 in the program, with a lower load) compared to those from non-bilingual centers. bilingual (6.19).
However, critics counterattack by saying that these grades should deduct the impact of the higher economic level of students in bilingual centers.
Those against the bilingual program use, among other documents, an article by the head of the British Council for a Multilingual World, Ann Veitch, who warned last year in the magazine EL Gazette that research has shown that students need between six and eight years of learning a foreign language to develop sufficient academic and cognitive mastery to study other subjects in that language.
“Parental demand may lead politicians to introduce bilingualism from primary school, but widespread and uncritical adoption in parts of the Global South is forcing children to swim or sink, turning English into a significant problem rather than a support their learning.”
Proponents rely on other research that shows just the opposite: that learning another language is not a burden and can even be beneficial for developing critical thinking.
Among them are 25 teachers from around the world who have analyzed the Madrid bilingual program and who have signed a letter to Viciana asking him to withdraw the measure.
They argue that, according to studies, students with difficulties expressing content in English also have difficulties in Spanish and that bilingual students address more critical and reflective aspects of History content than students from non-bilingual centers, who tend to express rote content. .
“The voices against the program are usually based on opinions and prejudices such as supposed cultural colonialism or have a fixation with the gaps in vocabulary in Spanish,” criticizes Ana Llinares, professor of applied linguistics at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
DVD1200.
Isabel la Católica bilingual school, Plaza de BArceló.. Álvaro García.
02/16/2024Álvaro García
The other major issue of friction is the “segregation” of students into different tracks, breaking the principle of equality, according to critics in the left camp.
In secondary school, students are divided into two paths: the section, for those who have a greater command of English (it can reach 70% of the teaching time without including Language or Mathematics in any case) and the program (where only the lesson is given in English). language subject in that language and another to choose between Physical Education, Technology or Plastics).
The British organization Save the Children has denounced that the Madrid system leads school segregation between the poor and the rich in Spain.
The division into itineraries was reproduced in the Aguirre years, who advocated “not mixing students with different levels in the same class.”
“This is the work of a president who defended that if a girl wanted to be a hairdresser, no one should stop her,” criticizes Miguel Martínez, spokesperson for Acción Educativa.
However, even some critics of Aguirre recognize that bilingualism has been able to benefit some poor children who today enjoy a high level of English at university or in the labor market.
Now the question arises as to whether the Community of Madrid is considering continuing to reform its bilingual program.
Key to answering this question could be the result of the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of bilingualism on both schools and students (the exam, which was awarded last year to the University of Cambridge and will conclude in 2026. This research had been claimed by the Madrid educational community, which was outraged by the implementation of an educational experiment that was not evaluated, ignoring aspects such as the effect on students with special needs.
But perhaps the long-awaited aspiration of improving the English of Spaniards is more feasible thanks to a change outside of schools.
It's an observation by Vaughan, the English professor who interviewed Aguirre.
He believes that social media and platforms like Netflix are probably doing much more to that end than bilingual schools themselves.
“People today hear English without realizing it,” Vaughan responds to this newspaper, “that has helped the level to improve a lot.”
Perhaps this explains why some non-English-speaking countries speak English better without having gone so far in implementing bilingual programs.
Perhaps there is no better educational recipe for learning a second language than living it.
Write to the author at
fpeinado@elpais.es
or
fernandopeinado@protonmail.com
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