Marching For Education?

A hundred and twenty million steps sounds a good deal more impressive than ten thousand people, but ten thousand there were (organisers' figures) marching on the capital: more a green, slow-moving road block than a green tide - a "marea verde" (or better, "verda"). 

The march of the ten grand started at ten on Saturday morning in Inca. It would appear that it takes eight and a half hours to walk from Inca to Palma's Plaça Major, though it might have been quicker had it gone straight down the motorway. Symbolically, however, this would have been a poor idea. The ten thousand heard that in 2011 they, and indeed the whole of the Balearics, were to have expected "motorways of education". Needless to say, the motorways had not been built. All that had been delivered were cart tracks.

It was a strange metaphor to have offered, but then it had been strange for the Bauzá administration to have apparently been promising motorways of education in the first place. What is a motorway of education exactly? There again, once Bauzá had realised that his government had made a balls-up of so-called free selection of teaching languages (between Catalan and Castellano) and had conjured up the non-manifesto item of trilingual teaching, perhaps the motorway had been being built after all: English on the outside fast lane, Castellano in the middle lane, and Catalan reduced to a crawl on the inside lane.

This motorway madness, though, was ended by the Trafico of schools which had rather bent the figures of numbers of parents who had plumped for the politically incorrect Castellano option in order to scupper free selection and subsequently of the combined forces of unions, teachers' assembly (Assemblea de Docents), parents' associations, school directors and opposition parties. The boys in green were substituted by the green t-shirts of the green tide. Halt! Stop! The fast and middle lanes were exceeding the teaching-hour limits. The inside lane had to be given its priority again.

A month away from the regional parliamentary election, the Assemblea and its fellow slow-moving travellers had given ample warning of their intention to once more voice their discontent with the government's language policies: primarily the one to do with teaching languages. Here was to be a reminder to the electorate of the dictatorship of Bauzá, the authoritarianism of Bauzá and of the cart tracks travelled by those who were instead aspiring to maintain freedom.

Language rights, said Jaume Mateu, the president of all-things-Catalan promoters, the Obra Cultural Balear, had been subjected to "ruthless attacks" from the dictator. After eight and a half hours on the march, the blistered-feet ten thousand needed such a rallying cry. The comedian Miquel Àngel Llonovoy quipped that, as Bauzá loved English so much, they would be saying "goodbye" to him in May (goodbye said in English, you understand). It would have brought the house down had there been a house to have been brought down.

The day before the march, the Mallorcan federation of parents' associations and the Balearics' co-federation of parents' associations had complained to the board which oversees fair play at elections about Bauzá's "totalitarian attitude". The Partido Popular had complained to the same board about a campaign by these associations which it considered was designed to "influence voters". Somehow, one doubts that there will be any influence: minds have long been made up, positions have long been taken in the teaching languages' battle. (By the way, has the Mallorcan federation ever taken any English lessons? Its acronym, FAPA, is, when spoken in English slang terms, somewhat unfortunate.)

When it finally draws to a close, the obituaries for the current Bauzá administration will speak of one issue above all that has dominated. It hasn't been financing of the Balearics by central government, it hasn't been the occasional "collapses" in the health service, it hasn't been oil prospecting, it hasn't been the tourism law designed to meet the desires of the hoteliers, it hasn't even been corruption (and this really is an accusation that Bauzá doesn't deserve), and it most definitely hasn't been the stupidity of Magalluf's "mamading" and the even greater stupidity of the reaction. It has been TIL: trilingual teaching.

Throwing around descriptions such as totalitarian is also pretty stupid, but then, playing fast and loose with legal procedure, being revisionist in terms of manifesto claims, dumping TIL "wets" like ex-education minister Bosch have all played a part in a policy that, at best, has been insensitive. The arguments - for and against - have been chewed over often enough, so there is little point in their being regurgitated. But whatever merits TIL might have had (or indeed might still have) have been obscured by the deliberateness of political posturing by the government and its opponents. Who is marching for a sensible and consensual education system?