“And you, what do you talk about at recess?”, one day the Biscayan teacher and pedagogue Nélida Zaitegi asked her granddaughter, who studies in an ikastola that teaches in Basque. “We speak Basque, amama [grandmother]”.

Between 2017 and 2020, Zaitegi was the president of the Euskadi School Council, a body that has emerged in recent decades as a kind of Jiminy Cricket of the Basque Country education system, that body that says out loud what many they prefer not to hear. First, some time ago, she warned of segregation problems, with lower-income students concentrated in certain schools. And last year, Zaitegi herself presented a report to the autonomous Parliament warning that she is also failing in her bilingualism goals, laying the seed that has crystallized in the last month in a debate on what some media have described as the " failure of the D model. Which is almost like talking about the failure of the system, since that model is the school route in which, with Basque as the vehicular language of teaching, 77.11% of Basque students in infants, primary schools and ESO study. If we look only at public centers, they are practically all, 95.1%.

The data from the Basque Institute for Educational Assessment, for 2019, are compelling: 40% of second-year ESO students (13 years old) are not proficient in Basque (in 2017 it was 34.4%) and another 13 .1% is neither in that language nor in Spanish (10.8% in 2017). And the figures do not improve much if we look only at model D, which in public does not get half of the boys to reach the bilingualism goals.

Some of the main educational actors, among which are the Basque Government, the ikastolas (centers that were born with the ambition of defending the Basque culture and language and that today are mostly subsidized) or Zaitegi itself , they refuse to consider that panorama as a failure. On the contrary, they remain with all that knowledge of Basque has advanced since the three school pathways were established in the eighties (in addition to D, model A, with Spanish as the vehicular language, and model B, mixed at 50%). In 2019, 78% of young Basques between the ages of 15 and 29 stated that they speak Basque well; in 2004 it was 52%, according to a survey by the Basque Youth Observatory.

However, the figures for the drop in bilingualism in schools have aroused enough concern to sit on the couch an educational system that, despite registering better results than the state average in very important areas (the rate of repetition or early school leaving, for example), faces serious problems. Not only does he have these pending accounts with bilingualism, but also with segregation: the percentage of students with the lowest income in public schools was 85% of model A in 2017, 50% of model B and 32% of model D; in the subsidized it is, respectively, 6%, 9% and 3%, according to data from the Euskadi School Council. Taking into account that the concerted represents almost half of the school system. Laura Luengo, a 24-year-old computer science student and spokesperson for the Euskadi-Ikasle Sindikatua Student Union, assures that the Basque Country "is the EU territory with the most privatized education." And he adds: "It is not only a failure of the D model, but of the privatization policies, of favoring the concerted one."

In addition, the Basque school does not manage to shine at the level of the budgetary efforts that are dedicated to it, as the association of parents of the Ehige Basque public school recalled in a recent note. Between 2004 and 2018, they have dedicated an average of 6,663 euros a year to each public and subsidized school student, 1,696 euros more than in all of Spain (34% more) and 1,166 more than Castilla y León, a community that systematically obtains better results than the Basque Country in the OECD Pisa tests.

The Basque Government, chaired by Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu (PNV), has decided to bring forward the approval of a new education law for the community by one year to 2022, to replace that of 1993, for which it hopes to achieve a great deal political and social consensus. The Basque Department of Education does not consider that model D has failed either. "The fact that 81.2% of the new families in our education system have decided to enroll their sons and daughters in model D is already a success," says a spokesman. "Basque education is in good health, always taking into account aspects of improvement," he adds.

In the diagnosis, many specialists agree, however, that the difficulties have come with the generalization of the D model, that is, a linguistic immersion in a language with roots and characteristics very different from those of Spanish ( unlike what happens with Catalan). Zaitegi explains how this point has been reached: “Model A gradually became a very residual thing, where students with special educational needs, from a lower socioeconomic level, were concentrated, that is, it became almost a thing of segregation, with which the centers, trying to avoid it, gradually moved to D, which now occupies practically everything”. And so came what the Education inspector Alfonso Fernández calls the "popularization of model D", which went from teaching "to very few students, and highly selected, because it was for families of upper-middle socioeconomic level", to welcoming " to the entire population”. In other words, now that almost everyone studies in Basque, including some of the poorest and those from areas with very low levels of family and social use of the Basque language, the results have worsened. Especially if, in addition, as Francisco Luna, one of the prestigious personalities of the State School Council, recalls, this includes teachers and families who, unlike what happened years ago, are not fully involved in the Basque language project .

The added problem is that, in addition to the objectives of bilingualism, the “learning of other knowledge” may be being affected —or at least be on the way to it happening,“ says Zaitegi. “If I have to learn geography or mathematics in Basque and my level of Basque is very weak, well man…, that is going to have an impact, even if it is much less than what people think”, he adds. At this point, Fernández is not so clear about this influence — "Several analyzes have been carried out through Pisa on this issue and the results are not conclusive" — and for this reason he calls, to begin with, for serious studies to be carried out on the situation.

A function “that does not correspond to it”

What almost everyone is clear about is that the issue goes beyond the educational system, in a very pluralistic society, with areas where the use of Basque is absolutely widespread, such as Gipuzkoa, and others, such as Bizkaia and especially Bilbao, where its use is often limited to the school environment. The vice-secretary of the Academy of the Basque Language, Erramun Osa, who insists time and time again that the evolution of the school in Euskera "rather than a failure, has been a success", points out in any case: "We have to assume that we have given the educational system a function that in reality does not correspond to it: to make its contribution to the process of recovering the language”. The spokesman for the Department of Education makes a similar reflection: “Model D is getting our society to have higher percentages of Basque-speaking speakers; but the advancement of the Basque language should not fall solely on the educational system, since it is a challenge that we face as a society in other areas”.

Txaber (17 years old), Josu and Zihara (both 14 years old) study at the Kirikiño ikastola in Bilbao with model D. They also speak Basque at home. However: "At recess and with friends, at least here in Bilbao, we speak Spanish," says Txaber and his classmates nod. Its center, a cooperative born in 1977 at the impulse of parents who wanted to put Basque culture and language at the center of their children's education, is in an environment ―between the neighborhoods of Txurdinaga, Begoña, Otxarkoaga and Santutxu― with strong social predominance of Spanish.

Thus, this concerted center becomes for many students a kind of island in Basque. The director, Amaia Galindez, and the person in charge of the linguistic project, Iraitz Garai, talk about their efforts to promote extracurricular activities in Basque. Txaber, Josu and Zihara explain that their free time is mainly in Spanish, the language in which they watch movies at the cinema and in which most of the music they listen to is played. In this context, they admit, everything leads to the fact that, naturally, the easiest thing to do is to choose Spanish among friends. Especially when they have classmates who have never fully adapted to Basque. "No matter how hard the ikastola tries, it continues to be difficult for them, because speaking it at home is a great help," adds Txaber. In 2nd year of ESO, the use of Basque at recess dropped to 21.8% in 2017, 1.8 points less than in 2011, according to a report from the Basque Government last year.

The writer and university professor Katixa Agirre insists on the importance of everything that is outside of school: “Only the educational system is not capable of saving a language or generating bilingual people in a general way. If outside of school the child does not find any reference in Basque and it becomes only the academic language, the language cannot be fully experienced”. Her own case is atypical, she says: the daughter of a Spanish-speaking household in a working-class neighborhood of Vitoria, she studied primary school in the late eighties and early nineties with model B (mixed) in a school where "nobody brought home Basque”. But from then on, he made the leap to model D in secondary school and gradually embraced, "naturally", Basque both as a social language (it is the one he speaks to his children), and as a professional; is the one he uses as a writer.

Agirre believes that today it would be very difficult for a case like his to be repeated. Because outside of school, in the field of leisure and, above all, the audiovisual, Spanish, and even English, crush the presence of Basque. "In my time, we watched cartoons in Basque at the ETB," he recalls. And he adds: "My eight-year-old daughter is already abandoning it [Basque], because she sees that the other language is the dominant language."

Generational change

But, also, because then, in his time, “there was more sense of militancy and that was noticeable in the teachers. For example, in a model B, in a neighborhood that was not Basque at all, they transmitted love for the language”. A generational change that Zaitegi also talks about. "We all became very aware and very, very hot -really, I think it was very nice- to make the language really useful for life". But that's not the case anymore, he sighs.

Maybe from exhaustion. Perhaps because Basque society is today more heterogeneous (between 2003 and 2019 the number of students born abroad has quadrupled). Perhaps because at times, especially if it is only used as an academic language, it can be experienced as an imposition and generate rejection. Txaber admits that in his class there is "more than one classmate" in this situation. "Hate... I don't know if I hate, but they do have a rejection, because in the end, at home they have always spoken in Spanish, they have been put here and they have said, I can't with this," he explains.

“Things that are imposed by force do not work. I insist a lot: Basque has to enter through the heart. We have no other choice”, affirms Zaitegi. For this reason, he believes that the system of models must be overcome to give schools autonomy, so that they decide what is the best proportion of teaching in each language, depending on their context, in order to achieve the goal of bilingualism, that is, that students students leave secondary school proficient in Basque and Spanish. During Isabel Celaá's time at the head of the Department of Education of the Basque Government of the PSE (2009-2012) an experiment of trilingualism took place: 20% of classes in Basque, another 20% in Spanish, another 20% in English, and the remaining 40% the language or languages ​​that the center decided, according to its students and their context, which had to be reinforced more. The experiment, according to sources familiar with the initiative, had very good results, but it was abandoned with the change of government.

Francisco Luna, who is also president of the European Forum of Educational Administrators (FEAE) in Euskadi and directed the Basque Institute for Educational Evaluation, also speaks of the autonomy of centers, because now that model D "has become the model of the system", believes that it is necessary to rethink it so that it can attend to Basque-speaking students and also to Spanish-speaking ones, who "need different attention, different resources, different linguistic processes". Luna talks about "resuming some basic principles that have been lost along the way, such as remembering that in a bilingualism model all teachers, in all subjects, are also language teachers", that linguistic reinforcement in high school or that students have to talk a lot more in class. It also calls for introducing the advances that research is opening up, which sometimes correct classic dogmas, such as the one that said that the Basque teacher could not use Spanish: "Now there are processes that say that, to learn a language, you have to use as refers to the language that is most mastered”. Erramun Osa, for his part, highlights the great margin that exists, in his opinion, for the general improvement of teaching methodologies.

“The central axis must be the students, not the Basque language”

However, other actors such as EH Bildu claim to embrace linguistic immersion in Basque for the entire system as the only way to stop the deterioration ( or advance faster, as they prefer) in the use of the Basque language. They agree with this both from the public Laura Luengo, from the Ikasle Sindikatua, and from the concerted José Luis Sukia, general director of Partaide Ikastolas, one of the employers' associations in the sector: "Models are not the way, it has to be immersion linguistics, if not, it is impossible. This is a very important first step, but afterward we have to get people to feel affection for Basque, to feel it as something of their own and we [the school] cannot do that; it has to be the whole of society and it is a long-term job. We can get knowledge and there it is, but only knowledge does not save a language”.

The question is, taking up here the phrase of the vice-secretary of the Academy of the Basque Language about the burden “that does not correspond” to the educational system”, what happens with the one that does correspond to it?, asks the specialist in education Javier Nogales. “Education does not have to take charge of the Basque languageization of the entire population that is born or comes to live in the Basque Country. The school has the objectives that are established in the law: the integral development of a person, the achievement of scholastic success”, he points out. Nogales, a retired teacher who was also responsible for the CC OO Euskadi teaching federation and head of the Education cabinet during the PSE government in the Basque Country, complains that the agreements of the 1993 law on the models have been systematically breached, in such a way that, with the almost universalization of model D, immersion, that is, Basque as the vehicular language, already prevails de facto, for which reason it does not understand that it is requested to overcome the system of models or that it is proposed that the solution to problems is "more Basque". “The central axis cannot be Basque, that is outrageous; the central axis must be the student body, in all its plurality”.

However, there is a very general consensus in the Basque Country around this idea of ​​making knowledge of Basque a basic objective of the educational system, either with arguments defending the common cultural heritage or, as Luengo recalled, to avoid segregation. Even being aware, also in general, of the huge challenge it represents.

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