Representatives of the teaching staff at the Teachers' Assembly, on February 8, 2024, in Inca, Mallorca. Isaac Buj (Europa Press)
In December 2017, after the longest strike experienced in the educational sector of the Balearic Islands, the teacher coordinator who managed to bring a green tide of 100,000 people to the streets to protest the trilingualism plan of the Government of the popular José Ramón Bauzá froze his activity, although he left open the possibility of returning to mobilization if necessary.
Now, the Teachers' Assembly has met again to address the linguistic projects in the educational sector that the PP Government intends to promote after the legislative agreement signed with Vox.
A plan that aims to offer the choice of the language of instruction in primary courses next school year, to later extend it to the rest of the educational stages and that, according to the majority educational unions, will corner Catalan in the classrooms.
”The plan is an attack on the language, but for me it is also an attack on a linguistic community and an identity and a culture that is typical of the territory,” says Marina Vergés, one of the spokespersons for the Teachers' Assembly, which met on the afternoon of February 8 at the Berenguer d'Anoia Institute in the Majorcan town of Inca.
The meeting was attended by around 160 teachers - dressed in green t-shirts - from 60 schools on the islands who agreed to create various working committees on the most pressing demands of the sector.
For Vergés, the linguistic scenario that opens up in the classrooms as a result of the agreement between the PP and Vox is one of the reasons that have led them to take the step of reactivating, since they consider that it is an “ideological and not an ideological” measure. pedagogical.”
“We are always governed by the well-being and pedagogical benefit of our students and our community, so everything that has to do with ideology is a frontal attack on what our work as teachers is,” he maintains.
The Assembly criticizes that the Ministry of Education appeals to a lack of funds to resolve the main demands of the sector and "suddenly" has found 60 million euros to implement this initiative demanded and now agreed with the extreme right.
The so-called Voluntary Plan for Free Choice of Language agreed with Vox has been outlined this week by the Minister of Education, Antoni Vera, in a parliamentary commission.
It contemplates the possibility that educational centers that decide to apply it can offer the next course in the second and third cycle of primary school the possibility of doing mathematics and environmental knowledge in Spanish, subjects that until now are taught in Catalan, according to the linguistic project that each center has.
In the case of secondary education, schools could benefit from the plan starting in the 2025-2026 academic year.
One of the most criticized measures of this pilot project is the separation of minors based on the language in which they choose to take the subject, and the counselor has denied that it implies a segregation of the students, even though they will have to take the class. in different places.
Vera relies on the decree for communicative development in foreign languages approved by the left-wing pact in 2016, which contemplates the splitting of the student body for the learning of subjects in a foreign language, to deny that its pilot plan implies a segregation of the student body.
“If the choice that families make when they choose for their children to do mathematics in Catalan or English is called splitting, why does it have to be called segregation if the choice of language to do a subject is between Catalan and Spanish? ”, justifies Vera.
An argument that has ignited left-wing groups, who regret that the counselor equates official languages with foreign languages.
For the PSIB-PSOE deputy, Amanda Fernández, both cases are not comparable and she is "concerned" by the fact that the head of Education treats Catalan "as if it were a foreign language."
The counselor replies that his plan does not move one comma from the Balearic Educational Law or the Minimum Decree, which regulates Catalan in the classrooms, or the Linguistic Normalization Law and emphasizes that it is “totally voluntary” and will be the centers those who decide if they join.
Since the pact between PP and Vox to govern in the Balearic Islands and as a result of the measures agreed in the Balearic educational system, around 200 educational centers have joined the manifesto
La llengua es no tapa
in defense of Catalan, which is also the motto they have wanted to capture on the green t-shirts.
The next steps of the assembly involve creating working committees on the needs of the sector and proposing solutions to then decide the next actions to follow.
According to Vergés, this first meeting of the assembly was of an “organizational” type, with the aim of testing the spirits and mobilizing the centers to “be prepared” and react unanimously “to what rains down on us from outside.”
In 2013, the Teachers' Assembly, together with the unions, managed to mobilize the Balearic educational sector in a strike that lasted 15 days in protest against the trilingual plan of the then president of the regional government, the popular José Ramón Bauzá, which sought to distribute the burden of Catalan, Spanish and English in the classrooms, replacing the bilingual system that was applied until then.
More than 100,000 people took to the streets of Palma in the largest demonstration recorded in the history of the islands to protest the decree, which Bauzá applied without consensus with the educational community by virtue of its absolute majority.
Just a year and a half later, Bauzá lost the regional elections after a single mandate in favor of the socialist Francina Armengol, who repealed her trilingualism decree in the first Government Council that she presided over.
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