Euskara to become the main school language

Donostia, Monday, 12 March 2007 by Edu Lartzanguren  

"It could be a great step forward for the language", said Koldo Tellitu, President of the Ikastolas, the Basque-medium schools confederation, on Friday. The day before the Government in the Basque Autonomous Community launched a plan to reform the education system. The new scheme will do away with the much criticised three tier system, A, B and D, and open the way for Euskara (Basque) to be the main language in education.

For the last 25 years, Basque parents have been offered three models for their children's education, both in state run schools and private schools that receive money from the Basque government.

Model A offered education entirely in Spanish, where Basque was taught as a subject with four hours a week of Basque from the age of six on. Under model B about half of the subjects are taught in Basque and the other half in Spanish. Under model D pupils are taught entirely in Basque with some Spanish and English or French.

90% of parents choose the Basque only model

However, the system came under increasingly strong criticism over the last decade. Surveys by the Government have shown that only Model D guaranteed that students were proficient in Euskara by the time they reached secondary school. Additionally, Model D was also chosen by the parents of more than 90% of three-year-old infants in the Basque Autonomous Community. The rest chose model B, leaving model A as marginal.

New system for 2008-9

Now, all parties in the Basque Parliament, except for the Popular Party, have decided to change the current system.

The scheme presented last week by Tontxu Campos, the Secretary of Education of the Basque Autonomous Government, will make Euskara the main language and will set up minimum linguistic requirements for both official languages for every student and will give freedom to school boards to decide their own policy.

"Basque and Spanish both have the same legal status, so when students finish their education they must be equally proficient in both", said Campos on Saturday.

Students’ language skills will be put to test twice under the new scheme. At age 9-10 they will require the European B1 standard in both Basque and Spanish, where they will have to show that they are able to understand simple texts or speeches on familiar subjects and to be able to write and talk on the same level. By the age of 13, they will pass an exam for the B2 standard with complex tests and ideas on a variety of subjects. They will also have to pass a B1 test for English or French by the time they finish secondary education (age 15-16).

Schools will be free to make their own schemes and change the proportion of time they give to each language. For instance, in mainly Spanish-speaking areas they will be able to increase the number of subjects to be taught in Basque, in order to intensify the exposure to the lesser used language. In mainly Basque-speaking areas, where it is easier for students to learn both official languages, schools will be able to increase the time for English or French.

"We would like to see the new scheme implemented by 2008-9", said Campos. He added that students already learning in the three-tier system would continue in the chosen model until they finish school.

All-party support for the move, except for the PP

All Parliamentary parties expressed agreement and high hopes for the new scheme. The groups that form the three party government, nationalist EAJ-PNV, EA and the non-nationalist left Izquierda Unida-Ezker Batua, stressed that the majority backs the plan. Socialist Party PSE-EE, the Basque branch of the Spanish PSOE, said that the scheme was based on their own views. The pro-independence left group in the Parliament, EAB, said that the B2 standard was not "ambitious enough" and pointed to the C1 standard as the "proper objective" for 15-16 year olds.  Meanwhile, the Popular Party strongly condemned the proposal as "fundamentalist", and accused the government of giving "false data about the collapse of Model A so as to put it into question".

While President Tellitu of the Ikastola confederation welcomed the scheme, he warned that more hours in Basque will be "of no use" if the education of those Basque speakers is not based on a Basque curriculum. "If we want to educate the Basques of the 21st century, we will have to adapt the contents to new needs and challenges. For that a Basque school will need its own curriculum, and that will be the determining factor in strengthening and normalizing the language.” 

(Eurolang 2007)