educational reform reopens controversy over nationalisms

Not anymore, at least if, as expected, the Senate approves the text without changes. The mess threatens to become capitalized since the Celaá law omits to give that status to Castilian, although the minister recalled that this concept never existed until it was taken up, also by law, in 2013.

“Yes until 2013 (Spanish) It was not vehicular and there were presidents of the Government who did not put it, it will be because it was not necessary, "he defended.

His reform contains other controversial issues, such as a new pruning of the Religion subject - his qualification will not be considered for the granting of scholarships and those who choose not to take it should no longer enroll in one as a mirror subject-, the limitation of the requirement of money to families by the "concerted schools" -semipubic- and the possibility that students pass year dragging subjects. But none compares with the idiomatic question, in which Spanishists and Catalan nationalists, Basques, Galicians and others find a new battlefield to settle a cultural dispute that, at heart, is political.

While the Conservative Popular Party (PP) and other expressions of the right such as the liberal Ciudadanos and the Vox ultras have already announced that they will appeal to the Constitutional Court against that provision, referents of the Catalan independence movement celebrated it. According to Monserrat Bassa Coll, deputy for the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), “shielding linguistic immersion in Catalonia is more than a triumph because this law establishes that the vehicular language is decided according to the provisions of the autonomy statutes and the Law of Education of the Autonomous Communities (LEC) ”. "I la nostra is clear: Catalan is the vehicular language of l'ensenyament" in Catalonia, he pointed out, according to Euronews, without the need to be translated.

The political analyst Antón Losada told Ámbito from Spain that it is “a false conflict invented by the Spanish right. The ‘vehicular language’ was introduced by the PP in the 2013 Wert Law in an attempt to ‘Spanishize’ children, as Minister (José Ignacio) Wert said verbatim in Congress. Until that moment, no law established it nor was it necessary to generate such a conflict ”. "Why does one have to be vehicular?" He asked.

In addition to Spanish, Spain has four co-official languages ​​in their respective regions: Catalan, Galician, Euskera (Basque) and Aranese.

Losada, who is a tenured professor of Political Science at the University of Santiago de Compostela and has written books and academic articles on educational policy, added that “the available data tells us that in these communities children speak Spanish at the average or higher level. of the average of the State ”.

“The Constitutional Court has recognized the right to receive education in Spanish, but not the obligation that it be vehicular. It will continue to be taught in Spanish on an equal basis with the other official languages ​​(in each autonomous region) and in the terms regulated by the responsible administration, as the drafters of the Constitution clearly intended, ”the specialist told this newspaper.

From In fact, Article 3 of the Magna Carta states that “Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it ”. “The other Spanish languages ​​will also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes. The wealth of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage that will be the object of special respect and protection ”, he adds.

Nothing seems to indicate in the Celaá law that this is going to change and, in fact, a norm of this type could not contradict the constitutional text. However, the fight for the primacy in the use of the language, especially in teaching, in the autonomous communities that historically have hosted separatist movements of greater or lesser importance has a huge political background.

The Celaá law, attributed by his detractors of Sánchez's need to support his fragile parliamentary majority in parties that question the unity of the State, will continue his path in the Senate and, if he approves it, in the Constitutional Court.

The bid in the background, it is known, is another and does not stop.