Authentic social engineering and bobbin lace were used by the previous government of the Generalitat Valenciana of Ximo Puig – a policy led by Compromís – to advance the linguistic immersion of Catalan in the south. Spanish speaking of the province of Alicante. Among other strategies, there has been a “slow implementation.”
Like the Multilingualism Act – now repealed by the executive of Carlos Mazon– set a definitive maximum deadline for its application, the experimental plans aiming to allow certain centres to choose to go ahead, without ever delaying it.
However, “the hoax was to make it seem like it could be used to delay,” trying to convince families to vote in favor in the School Council to define the Center Language Project (PLC), because their children would not apply to them, since it would come into effect in the following promotions of students, says a teacher who experienced this process in Vega Baja.
The tension was growing and palpable: this region was becoming a powder keg against linguistic impositions in classrooms, with demonstrationsmultitude of thousands of people in Orihuela, among other cities.
“Parents deliberated in school councils about something that was wrong affect to their children, but to those who they came behind“, adds this teacher, who remembers as paradigmatic the case of a mother who, after having shown herself to be “a remarkable promoter of the defense of linguistic freedom, when she learned from the principal that what had been voted in this school council was not going to affect her children, who were going to continue their schooling in Spanish without major problems, he voted for it to be more agreeable in the eyes of the center’s management.
With this dynamic, a double injustice has been caused in practice, one due to this selfishness of sacrificing the freedom of choice of students from other families in exchange for being safe with their own. And also because “a segregation“, since the offer was made only to a predominantly Castilian region, Vega Baja, in order to relax the law and deactivate the response of the parents which should have been important”, analyzes this teacher.
That’s how it happened, with these demonstrations in the streets. And the grievance came because this proposal to postpone in some way the vote on the system “was not made to the other regions, because, for all this, it was a verbal offernever in writing: and in this way, some Spanish speakers were entitled to a slow application and others to that established by law.
For example, a student who was in the second year of compulsory secondary education (ESO), the year in which the few experimental projects in Orihuela were approved, never took any subject in Valencian until the end of his secondary studies. On the other hand, another teenager in the same class, but from the Spanish-speaking area of Castellón, “saw that he was they imposed subjects In Valencian and English from the approval of the PLC until he completes the baccalaureate.
