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| Indoctrination in a Catalan school |
I have mentioned Carlos Conde in my
post about the European Court of Human Rights. He has published another
article, this time a damning denunciation of how Catalan nationalism
exercises iron control over education. I have mentioned myself how a
child ended up in hospital after being literally thrown out of her
classroom for drawing a Spanish flag and children
were spied on in school playgrounds; the Catalan government itself has
admitted “incognito observation”
Carlos deals with these scandals and goes on to
describe the pernicious effect of nationalist policy on the administration of
education, which is entirely a regional power at primary and secondary levels:
When it came to teaching staff, the “selection” process was helpfully streamlined: while Catalan speakers could apply for a vacancy anywhere in Spain, only speakers of Catalan are likely to apply for vacancies in Catalonia. The effects of the policy were mutually reinforcing: attracting a carefully defined educational profile to the teaching profession; contributing to the departure of “uncomfortable” professionals; and ensuring that the focus of the Catalan education system remained militantly localistic, exempt from Spanish “contamination.”
Nationalist pressure presents itself at every stage of education: in the most recent university access exams, invigilators only issued students with the Catalan version of the exam. Despite being entitled to both and to choosing which one to attempt, candidates who preferred the Spanish script were forced to raise their hand and ask for it in examination halls hosting hundreds of fellow students. Invigilators were instructed to take note of their names and to mark such requests as an “incident” in their reports.
He also describes the scandalous case of Francisco Oya.
Oya is a professor of history at the Joan Boscà college in Barcelona. In January 2019, following a secretive investigation, he was sentenced to ten months of unpaid suspension by the Catalan education authorities. When Oya asked the inspector about the reasons for his “gross misconduct,” he was told that the class materials that he used “made Catalan nationalists look bad.”
…
SourcesIn 2015, Oya wrote a painstakingly rigorous report about the Catalan History curriculum. In it, he exposed hundreds of cases of manipulation, deliberate omission, and false facts. These ranged from consciously avoiding the term “Hispania” when referring to the Iberian Roman Empire to anachronistically referring to Catalonia as far back as in the Pre-History section of the syllabus. In the medieval and modern history chapters, all historical events were presented as a confrontation between virtuous, civilized Catalans, and oppressive, ignorant and violent Spaniards, often visually illustrated with grotesque caricatures.
(English)
The GlobePost
(Spanish)
El Mundo
(The Catalan government admits “incognito
observation” of children in school playgrounds.
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