Catalan, Spanish and the value of knowing languages

I live in Catalunya, this means that in here there are three official languages: Catalan, Spanish and Aranès (which unfortunatelly I'm not able to speak, mainly because it is not spoken in my region). At school kids are taught mainly in Catalan, using Spanish and English in their specific subjects. It has been done like this for 30 years (I think), but now there have been some parents (Spanish-speakers) who have complaint about this.

I know that most of the people who gets in this blog may not even know that in Catalunya there's a different language than from the rest of Spain, but there is, and it has more speakers (around 7 million I think) than some of the EU official languages. So it is not only a language that we have to preserve because of cultural richness but because it is alive and it was persecuted during the dictatorship years meaning that older people cannot write it correctly even if they understand it.

Teaching kids in Catalan is important because it helps them to integrate in the country, especially those whose parents are from other countries. Some people say that since we speak in Spanish too it is completely useless, but, as some of you might already know, the most languages you learn as a kid the easier it is to learn a new one afterwards. What's more if we had to learn languages only because of its usefulness many official languages of some countries would disappear because they are only spoken there.

I was taught mainly in Catalan so I can explain my own experience. Rising from a Catalan family, Catalan has always been my mother language and I only started learning Spanish about the same time I started learning English, which I think was when I was 8 years old, fairly late I have to admit this. Even after a late start I am competent in Spanish, I guess I should say more than competent, although I hardly ever speak it, not because I don't want to, but because I don't need to since I mostly speak in Catalan or in English. This doesn't mean that I don't value my knowledge in Spanish, it has prepared my mind to learn other languages like French, English or even Icelandic.

So this is a message to everyone who thinks that learning Catalan is useless and that Spanish should be the main language... go live to another country and ask them to teach your kids in Spanish... we'll see what they say.