Immersion: is the future the past?

On June 18, the European Court of Human Rights rejected the appeal filed by a number of families against the ruling of the TSJC that obliged a school in Canet to teach 25% of the lessons in Spanish in a P5 class. According to the Court, the appeal is not well-founded; someone should have explained to the families that alleging a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to this matter had no prospects.That the inadmissibility was so foreseeable does not detract from the fact that the Court's reasoning is entirely inadmissible. (No serious judge can claim, for example, that in Catalonia Spanish is "prohibited" as a language of instruction.) But beyond these trivial observations, a deeper reflection is necessary.The first thing to say is that in comparative terms the Catalan model is difficult to understand. In Europe there is no other case in which immersive teaching in a regional or minority language is compulsory for all students in the relevant territory. In Wales and Scotland, there is immersive teaching in Welsh and Gaelic respectively, but it is not compulsory. In the Basque Country and Navarre, there is also immersive teaching in Basque, but it is also not compulsory. Etc.Besides the known judicial reprimands, mandatory immersive teaching in Catalan has also been criticized because it "Castilianizes" Catalan-speaking students, to the extent that (for demographic and social reasons) Spanish has become de facto the language of common use in most educational centers. There is a political party (Alhora) that professes this belief and advocates for two educational networks to choose from: an immersive network with 100% in Catalan and a non-immersive network with Catalan and Spanish as vehicular languages.

The double network would automatically neutralize delusions like the one from the ECHR (no one could argue that the practice of teaching "exclusively" in Catalan puts "Spanish" families residing in Catalonia at a disadvantage), but it is not the solution. The idea of the double network is inspired by the Basque Country, where the so-called D model acts as an immersive network and the other models are the non-immersive network. The million-dollar question is whether the D model Basque-ifies. According to the director of the Sozolinguistika Klusterra, interviewed recently in this very newspaper, before "it was achieved that the children of non-Basque-speaking families ended up speaking Basque just like their classmates who came from Basque-speaking families", but with the generalization of the D model, which now gathers more than 80% of primary school students, "the index of use of Basque in school is decreasing over time". The Basque educational authorities have known this for a long time. In 2021, for example, the Basque Institute for Educational Evaluation and Research already stated that, given the social situation of Basque, as well as the influence of the family language on students, "the educational system cannot, on its own, guarantee that all students will achieve bilingualism". And attention: the system cannot guarantee that there will be no losses among Basque-speaking students "not even in the D model".

The Basque experience suggests that safeguarding immersion in Catalonia does not involve a double school network in which the equivalent of model D would concentrate the majority of students. Perhaps thinking about the imminent ruling of the Constitutional Court on the Catalan model, in his reply to the ECtHR, the Minister of Linguistic Policy said two interesting things. On the one hand, he said that the Government remains committed to a model that has Catalan as its "center of gravity." This is the metaphor used by the TC in the historic 1994 ruling that saved the linguistic-school model from the attacks it suffered at that time. On the other hand, the minister reiterated that the executive will continue working to ensure that all students leave Catalan schools with "full competence in both Catalan and Spanish." Perhaps it is time for the debate to move beyond the totemic issue of vehicular languages and focus on learning outcomes. What Catalonia needs is a system that effectively bilingualizes students; lo and behold, after so many years of controversy, perhaps safeguarding immersion consists of going back 32 years and ensuring the constitutionality of a model that, as the TC said in 1994, aims to "correct and overcome the existing imbalances between the two co-official languages in the Autonomous Community" on the condition that this does not determine "the exclusion of Spanish as a teaching language, so that its knowledge and use in the territory of the Autonomous Community is guaranteed."