Spanish Education Minister against Catalan Schools

The huge controversy caused by Spanish Education Minister Wert’s efforts to undermine the Catalan school system, and his new law to “improve education quality” hides something more than a simple attack to our language. Indeed, this minister-hooligan has other goals in mind.    

Reading the draft, we can see Wert's hidden agenda—indeed FAES' invisible hand is far reaching and generously funded by the Spanish government. What he intends to do is putting in place a centralized educational system, which would divide students according to their potential—ignoring their abilities. This would have a negative effect on equal opportunity and social cohesion, and it would lead to a decrease in the overall quality of public and charter schools. They are also proposing a mandated evaluation test—let's forget about actually educating kids—which would focus on critical thinking and a smattering of social science and history facts. In reality, however, this new law is a time-bomb aimed at  destroying Catalonia's educational system, and it would mean going back to a segregated school system with very worrisome indoctrination undertones—all this right in the middle of school budget cuts which have already left most schools in a deplorable situation. It is an explosive combination.

In fact, the new law is not a proper law, but it consists of an introduction and the text proper (one article in total) that modifies quite a lot of articles from the current education law, to the point of making it completely unrecognizable—a kind of Frankenstein law. The introduction states the intentions of the writers by using definitions of education like “the engine that promotes competitiveness in economy” or “a source of symbolic and material advantages.” Education is turned into just a mere materialistic and ideological tool completely disconnected from actual learning.  

In its ultraconservative fervor, the new law defines the Spanish educational system as “the union of public and private actors, who define regulation, finance and services of education in Spain as well as the set of relations, structures, steps, and actions implemented to promote it.” According to this, education stops being a universal right, it becomes just a service that it not public by definition, with shareholders and private company structures. From this point on, everything is possible: the creation of a new vocational school degree for those students who being 15 years old cannot finish middle school, although this new degree is not equivalent to a middle school diploma; the elimination of social sciences in elementary school; the establishment of two segregated classes for secondary school students, one for “academic studies” and the other for “applied sciences studies;” the recognition of religion as a core subject; the dropping of contemporary history from the science and technology curriculum; the establishment of three final exams—all of them standardized; and finally the disappearance of standardized exams for university access. Furthermore we have to point out that school boards will become mere advisory organs instead of being decision making.

But there is more, lots more. For example, the new law defines “specialization within school according to curriculum, function, or type of students” which becomes an open door to inequality, because it segregates students according to various parameters (in Catalonia this means the native language). In general this new law generates a chasm between public schools as a public service, and public schools as private enterprises governed by other criteria, which means this public schools would lose government funding. Also, the new educational law makes official and legalizes the agreement with elite schools which segregate students by their gender, breaking the principle of co-education and no discrimination. This is a flagrant case: until now the law was not as forceful as it should have been and any kind of conflict was always sorted out by the judges. In Catalonia, when some trade unions denounced that these educational agreements were segregational, the Catalan Department of Education decided to close some of these schools, but the same judge from the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia kept on sentencing in favor of these elite segregating schools. Surprisingly in other autonomous regions the governments that decided to denounce these schools managed to obtain sentences in favor, sometimes by their Superior Courts of Justice or by the Spanish Supreme Court. Unfortunately all these sentences won’t be valid anymore because of the new educational law: the segregation of students will be indisputably legal. This is nothing but shocking: while the Spanish government appeals to sentences in order to justify its attacks to linguistic immersion, the same government easily forgets them to reinforce gender segregation. Perhaps they do it on purpose to avoid new litigation

Mr. Wert's proposal will be the death knell for integration in Catalan schools and the presence of Catalan in Catalonia's education system, and it encroaches on competencies pertaining to the Catalan Government, reducing its capacity of decision to the bare minimum. Because of this, Catalan governments need to be radical in their opposition to ministerial orders and a strong defender of the spirit of Catalan laws. The Catalan government has to refuse to apply the new Spanish education law—if it ever manages to reach a two thirds majority in the Spanish Congress. The traditions of our schools have Catalan language as their main objective as well as their principal driving force. We cannot afford to lose either of them.

Josep Bargalló Valls @JosepBargallo

First Minister and Minister of the Presidency of Catalonia 2004-2006

Minister of Education of Catalonia 2003-2004

Councillor in Torredembarra Town Council (1995-2003)

President of the Ramon Llull Institute (2006-2010)

From 2010 he is a Professor at the University Rovira i Virgili

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