Political control of schoolchildren and police in Catalonia

The Catalan government is officially called the Generalitat. Unofficially it is widely known as the Genestapo. In this post we look at how it keeps political control of the schools and the police, two very sensitive areas for totalitarian governments.

Political control of schools 

We have already seen the way in which the Catalangovernment interferes politically in the lives of schoolchildren by spying onthem. Now the children are being asked for their political opinions.

The El Morell secondary school in Tarragona circulated a questionnaire from Lérida University to be completed by the pupils. It contained the questions:

To what extent do you feel:

1 Catalan

2 Spanish

3 Of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you feel proud of being:

1 Catalan

2 Spanish

3 Of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you identify with:

1 The Catalan language

2 The Spanish language

3 The language of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you identify with:

1 Catalan culture

2 Spanish culture

3 The culture of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you identify with:

1 The independence movement

2 The non-independence movement

Answers to be given as a score from 1 (never) to 5 (always)

“We don’t understand why the pupils have to be asked these questions,” said one mother. The documentation in the study says that “Participation is voluntary, anonymous and confidential” but parents have said that that was not the case. The school is trying to row back, saying, “We didn’t know the content of the questionnaire,” (yeah, sure, pull the other one) and “We have proposed the individualised return of the questionnaires to the families who ask for them or else collective destruction.” The individualised return of anonymous questionnaire forms – now there’s a thought!

The questionnaire form shown here is presented in Catalan only. That is the only language that can be used in Catalan schools for any purpose at all. Why? Because it ensures that the lower classes will have poor Spanish and will not be able to leave Catalonia. The policy of linguistic immersion is not practised by the  Catalan bourgeoisie. The latest in a long line of hypocritical top Catalans to be discovered avoiding the policy that they impose on the lower orders is a well-known footballer called Pep Guardiola, who sends his children to the American Benjamin Franklin school in Barcelona, a “truly international school” where the teaching “is entirely in English, with language courses offered in Spanish, Catalan and French”. It must be said though that he hasn’t quite worked out quite what a international education is about: “My children go to school with Indian people, black people, normal people …”

Political control of the police

In 2016 Victor Tarradellas was the Secretary for International Relations of CDC, the name at that time of Carles Puigdemont’s party (now JxCat). He was a trusted confidant of former Catalan premier Artur Mas and of Puigdemont at the time when the 2017 illegal referendum was being planned. If a government is planning an illegal action on the scale of a referendum, it obviously has to have the police on its side. It was Victor’s job to find out which senior officers (“comisarios”, like superintendent) of the Mossos (Catalan police) could be trusted.

“Fainthearted separatist”, “comes from the Guardia Civil”, “red”, these are some of his comments, which were accompanied by positive and negative marks against the names. He kept his comments in a notebook that has come to light in the course of a judicial investigation into illegal funding of the party.

He had a list of 45 officers marked on three scales: patriotism and determination, management ability and charisma, and institutional loyalty. His notes praised recently promoted officers while criticising others for having come from the Guardia Civil or for their being close to the Spanish socialist party PSOE. The current chief officer of the Mossos Eduard Sallent had a top score on all three scales with a positive mention of his background in the nationalist student union FNEC. “Very separatist” was the verdict.

Sources

(Spanish)

Diari de Tarragona

Un estudio pregunta a alumnos de El Morell si son independentistas

(A study asks pupils at El Morell if they are separatists)

Mundo deportivo

La polémica frase de Guardiola: “Mis hijos van al colegio con gente india, gente negra, gente normal...”

(Guardiola’s controversial sentence: “My children go to school with Indian people, black people, normal people …”)

El Independiente

Un dirigente de CDC hacía listas de "buenos y malos" comisarios de los Mossos

(A leading member of CDC made lists of “good and bad” senior officers of the Mossos)

(English)

Benjamin Franklin International School

Propaganda in Catalan schools

 

One picture is genuine and one is a fake. Of course, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Britain will know that it is unthinkable for political propaganda to appear on a school gate. In fact, in the utterly expected absence of any such genuine image I have cropped it from what is an obvious montage that had no intention to deceive.

And equally of course, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Catalonia will know that it is absolutely normal for schools to have pro-independence propaganda at their gates. This picture is of the Enxaneta primary school in Valls. It is a public (state) school run by the Catalan government.

Sources

(English)

Express

UKIP row school BANNED pupils from voting for party in mock election saying it is 'RACIST'

(Spanish)

Dolça Catalunya

Por aquí han de pasar cada mañana los niños de este colegio de Valls

(The children of this school in Valls have to walk over this every morning)

Catalonia’s Education System: Indoctrination, Victimization, and Linguistic ‘Spies’

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.”

…

In 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.

Sources

(English)

The GlobePost

Catalonia’s Education System: Indoctrination, Victimization, and Linguistic ‘Spies’

(Spanish)

El Mundo

El Govern admite que se "observó de incógnito" a niños en los recreos

(The Catalan government admits “incognito observation” of children in school playgrounds.

Spying on schoolchildren

The paranoid obsession
"Don't touch our Catalan language"

The language battle in Catalonia has reached the stage where a publicly funded organisation can spy on children in school playgrounds to discover which language they are speaking to interact with each other and with teachers. This is part of a campaign to eliminate the Spanish language entirely from Catalan schools, even in children’s free time. A member of the Catalan parliament, Sonia Sierra Infante of the Liberal Ciudadanos Party, reports that the pro-Catalan-language pressure group Plataforma per la Llengua (PplL), which receives a hefty subsidy from the Catalan government, was secretly observing language use in schools.

According to figures published by the Catalan government itself, Spanish is the usual language of 50.73% of the population of Catalonia  compared to  only 36.29%  who speak Catalan. The Catalan-only policy in schools is a blatant attempt to engineer language use away from reality towards the nationalist fantasy world.

PplL reached these conclusions after making “incognito observations” in 50 Catalan primary and secondary schools of the “language behaviour” of children and teachers. It recognises that “the schools were not informed of the full reality of the activity” and that “it was not possible to tell anybody of the purpose of the research to avoid of risk to the reliability of the data.” The schools where the observation took place are not identified, calling into question the methodological reliability of the study.

The schools did not know that they were being analysed because they had been asked for permission to do research “from a game activity during playtime that had nothing to do with language”. In each school, 15 children and one teacher were observed (the one on playground duty) through a game activity in which, in fact, the only purpose was to find out what was the usual language that the pupils and teacher used “spontaneously” with each other without knowing that they were being investigated. According to the authors, “nobody” was informed of the real goal of the research in order not to prejudice the reliability of the data, although the Catalan Education Ministry “knew what we were doing” And it was not vetoed.

PplL concluded that Catalan was spoken in only 24% of school playgrounds in Catalonia and 27% of secondary teachers spoke Spanish with children at playtime, with the use of Catalan by children  falling to 13.8% “in the areas where it is most necessary”. It describes this as an “anomalous situation” that is not in line with the legal requirement that Catalan should be the only language used at all in schools. Catalonia is the only place in the world where children are denied education in the official language of the country.

The Catalan Education Minister Josep Bargalló, of the extreme Catalan Republican ERC party, denies all knowledge of the matter, claiming to have had no contract with Plataforma per la Llengua since a previous matter.

“I have no idea about it. I can assure you that I have no idea of where this comes from”.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

How the spies acted.

• Incognito. The language spies carried out “incognito observation” because “if the subject of the study is aware, it is highly probable that they will not act naturally”.
• In English. They pretended not to speak either Catalan or Spanish in order not to condition the class. They spoke to the teachers in English and then went on to do the observation.
• Notes. Then they withdrew to “a corner”, where they “made a note of the language in which the interactions between each pupil and between teacher and pupils took place.”

Sources

(Spanish)

El Mundo

Torra permite espías en los recreos para comprobar si los niños hablan catalán

([Catalan premier] Torra allows spies at playtime to check whether the children are speaking Catalan)

ABC

El castellano supera al catalán en 14 puntos como lengua habitual en Cataluña

(Spanish esxceeds Catalan by 14 points as thge suual language in Catalonia)

El Español

‘Topos’ en el recreo de los niños catalanes: así les espiaban cuando hablaban castellano en el patio

(“Moles” at playtime for Catalan children: how they were spied on when they spoke Spanish in the playground)

(Catalan)

The 29-page PplL report (pdf)

Update 17.20 CEST 19 July 2019. This link now returns a 404. The report has already been pulled by PplL. It certainly  existed. I have a pdf file.

No Spanish in Catalonia

The language of the stupid

This is a singular case in Europe: The Catalan separatists have enforced a hegemony of their language – and have pushed Spanish out of school curricula.

While the Madrid court case against the alleged perpetrators of the illegal referendum on 1 October 2017 is coming to an end, the social conflict between the two groups of Catalans – those who want an independent Catalan state and those who regard themselves as both Spaniards and Catalans – is as acute as ever. It's just not news anymore, it's smouldering. And  the  lines of its argument are diabolically difficult to understand, for every detail in the great tale of Catalan independence aspirations is ideologically charged. This also applies to the language in which young Catalans are taught. Since school and university are not the focus of attention however, the repressive and gruelling struggle against Spanish has been largely waged in  silence.

Paul Ingendaay

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Die Sprache der Blöden

(The language of the stupid)

Schoolgirl draws Spanish flag and teacher throws her out of the room – literally!

“The teacher came up behind her, lifted her up and threw her to the floor. She hurt her back as she fell. Then the teacher picked her up by the T-shirt and the scruff of the neck and threw her out of the room.”

The mother of a 10-year-old girl who was thrown out of a classroom by a Catalan nationalist teacher for drawing a Spanish flag and writing “¡Viva España!” on the cover of her end-of-year project. She was taken to A&E.

DIAGNOSIS

DORSOLUMBALGIA (DORSOLUMBAR PAIN)

Constants: Weight: 29.800 Kg. Temp. 36.7º. Pulse: 119 bpm. Sat. 97%

Reason for consultation: 10-year-old girl attending A&E accompanied by her parents because of aggression by the teacher, as they report. The girl reports that in class she has drawn some Spanish flags accompanied by the phrase “Viva España” in her end-of-year album. She reports that when the teacher [name redacted] of the “Font de l’Alba” school in Terrassa saw her she shouted, seized her by the T-shirt, and as she did so the girl fell to the floor hitting her back, and later she took her by the neck to take her out of the classroom. The girl reports moderate pain in the first finger of her right hand and moderate right inguinal [groin] pain where she has a hernia awaiting operation. No other symptoms.

Personal history: Vaccinations: Up to date. Known allergies to medicines: None.

Pathological history: None of interest.

The hospital failed to follow the legal protocol that required it to report an attack on a child by an adult to the police and the child-protection agency. The Catalan mafia elite protects its own. The parents themselves made a police report and are receiving support from the Catalan Resistance.

The case has of course come to the attention of the Catalan government, which has total control over education. It was dealt with by Jesús Viñas, an appointee of the ERC party in the Catalan education ministry, who classified the incident as minor misconduct (falta leve) and closed the case. The ministry office that handled the matter is this.

The yellow ribbon is the symbol of independence and support for the coup d’état against the Spanish state that was perpetrated by the Catalan government in September and October 2017.

There are credible reports that the teacher wore a yellow ribbon while teaching her classes. There are also reports that children were punished for speaking Spanish in the corridors and playground of the school. It goes without saying that Catalan is the only language allowed in the classroom. This is reminiscent of the infamous Welsh Not that was used until the mid 20th century to humiliate children in Welsh schools who were caught speaking their own language.

One result of this affair has been an outburst of pro-Spanish feeling in the school, with its gate and fence being covered with Spanish flags and anti-independence messages.

The nationalist control of education, with schools being a blatant tool of propaganda and indoctrination, is a terrible scandal in Catalonia. I intend to return to the subject.

Catalan TV3, which is funded directly out of taxation and is under the iron control of the government in a way that makes people as old as me feel positively nostalgic about the pluralism of Radio Moscow, gave this matter 30 seconds in its newscast. Only the government’s line was presented, that there was no physical mistreatment or ideological motivation. TV3 doesn’t do pluralism or balanced reporting.

To the best of my knowledge this has not been reported in any English-language news medium.

Sources (in Spanish)

La Razón

Denuncian la agresión de una profesora a una niña en un colegio de Tarrasa por dibujar la bandera de España

(Teacher reported to police for attacking a girl in a school in Terrassa who drew a Spanish flag)

Crónica Global

Denuncian la agresión de unaprofesora a una alumna por dibujar una bandera de España

(Teacher reported to police for attacking a pupil who drew a Spanish flag)

Crónica Global

El independentista que ha dadocarpetazo a la agresión a la niña de Terrassa

(The secessionist who has closed the case of the attack on the girl in Terrassa)

Crónica Global

¿Por qué el Hospital de Terrassa no llamó a la policía al tratar a la niña agredida?

(Why did the hospital in Terrassa not call the police when it treated the attacked girl?)

El Catalán

TV3 dedica medio minuto a laagresión a la niña en Terrassa y sólo ofrece la versión de la Generalitat

(TV3 allots half a minute to the attack on the girl in Terrassa and only offers the version of the Catalan government)