We must stop normalizing the fact that there are teachers who refuse to speak Catalan to children.

TaradilloIn 1976, the first Catalan immersion school opened near Perpignan. A teacher, Úrsula Ferrer, and seven children began an experience that has grown to include 1,100 students who now attend Catalan-language schools in seven primary schools and two secondary schools. This significant anniversary should serve as an opportunity to review the state of language immersion in our schools and secondary schools.

In the 1980s, the first immersive experiences in the Principality began in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, which ended up becoming a benchmark for defining the identity of the linguistic strategy of all public schools in our country.

Today, fifty years later, we have maintained the immersion strategy while the linguistic and cultural context has changed radically compared to what we had at the beginning of the experience. We have gone from a bilingual context in which we had to run a school with only two languages present (one dominant, the other historically persecuted and marginalized) to a multilingual and multicultural reality.

While the social and linguistic context has been enriched by the arrival of people from very diverse backgrounds, we in schools have made the mistake of thinking that simply speaking Catalan to children and young people is enough to create an immersive learning environment. This is somewhat the same mistake as thinking that coeducation consists merely of putting boys and girls together and educating them. These fifty years of Bressola could be a good time to thoroughly rethink what it means to be and to create an immersive Catalan-language school, in this new linguistic and cultural context we have today.

It is true that we must also prepare ourselves to face the onslaught coming from the judicial bodies, which in every ruling question, persecute, and curtail what this country decided to legislate with the Law of Linguistic Normalization (approved in the Parliament of Catalonia without a single vote against it!). How things have changed, even in the political class!

It is worth recovering the mastery of all the women and men who, in the most difficult years of Francoism, disobeyed the official status to create democratic schools and in Catalan whenever they could, even if it meant hiding the dictator's photo and hanging it up again when the inspectors visited.

We must also stop normalizing and accepting that there are teachers, high school teachers or leisure educators who refuse to speak Catalan to children and who do not understand that immersion is the tool that brings together this rich and culturally diverse environment.

And, above all, we must continue working to create a good, democratic and open school that embraces these diversities and challenges the intelligence of children and young people so that they discover that school is the place where they can build their present and their future, in a game of diverse identities that they find in the language and culture of the country that welcomes them to the world.

These fifty years of Bressola are not just a birthday that recognizes the perseverance and commitment of families, teachers, and children in the north. It should also be an opportunity to ask ourselves what we can learn from our northern Catalan brothers and sisters in order to address, from within the school system, the complexities that define our society today.

Thank you, colleagues from Bressola, and here's to many more years!