La llengua de l'ensenyament (Comentari a la Sentència del Tribunal Constitucional 337/1994, de 23 de desembre)

Resum

Sentence 337/1994 of the Constitutional Court was reached in response to the appeal presented against several articles of Decree 362/1983 and of the Order that completes it, through which the Law of Language Normalization of Catalonia is implemented in the sphere of non-secondary education. After several appeals, in 1991 the Constitutional Court ordered the Supreme Court to decide on the legality of such precepts. At the time, the Supreme Court put forward a previous questioning of their constitutionality in relation to the articles of the Law of Language Normalization of Catalonia on which the contested articles are based. The articles in this law aim at achieving an unitary system of education built basically around Catalan, Catalonia's distinct language. The sentence of the Constitutional Court is based on the -transitory- process of the language normalization rather than on the issue truly at stake: the institutional competence on educational matters, as described in Catalonia's Statute of Autonomy, and on the authority to choose between an educational system built around one of the two official languages and a double system. On the other hand, the questioning of constitutionality by the Supreme Court presents an ideological, rather than legal, approach as far as this issue is concerned, which is the right to have an education in the language most commonly used during the early years of schooling and the alleged right by the parents -and by their children- to choose the official language in education at any level. The legal obligation to know Spanish is a matter expressed by both the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court. According to the author, speaking in legal terms, this is not so much a duty as a consequence of the officiality of the language. The impossibility to plead ignorance implies that the public institutions turn into mandatory matters both the education and the knowledge of the official language.