carta al Sr. Rojo

Sir- the letter by JM Rojo “Schools in a third of Spain teach only in minority languages” (Nature454, 575; 2008) caused surprise and indignation in Catalonia. Thirty years after Catalunya implemented its current education model, with documented social success with respect to the integration and avoiding ghettoization of immigrants, it is difficult to understand how a physiopathologist can sow indiscriminate lies about social issues in journals with international scientific prestige. The objective of the Catalan educational system is that all children be fluent in both Catalan and Castilian Spanish when they complete their education. It is absolutely false that it is "impossible to obtain public or publicly funded education in Spanish." What children cannot do is be educated exclusively in Castilian and, by law, they have the right and the duty to know both languages. Catalunya has been invaded and defeated throughout history by a variety of dictators, from Spain's Phillip V to Francisco Franco, who died in 1975. More than 30 years later, the systematic use of co-official languages as established in the current Constitution, approved in 1978 by the democratically elected Parliament of Spain and published in bilingual editions for each of the co-official languages, may still be difficult to understand in Madrid, but it makes a great deal of sense in Catalunya, Euskadi, and Galicia.