The Diplomat
The Instituto Cervantes has signed a collaboration agreement with the State of Bahia (Brazil) to promote the teaching of Spanish as a second foreign language in public primary and secondary schools.
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, signed this agreement last Wednesday with the Secretary of Education, Danilo de Melo Souza, as part of his official trip to Brazil to inaugurate the libraries of the Instituto Cervantes’ centers in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia. Under this general protocol, Cervantes will sell 40,000 licenses for the AVE Global (Aula Virtual de Español) platform to the State of Bahia (northeastern Brazil), which will make it possible to activate the Cervantes Institute’s online Spanish courses for an equivalent number of students in the public education network.
As the Spanish consul in Salvador de Bahia, Carlos Perez-Desoy Fages, explained to the Efe agency, the governor of Bahia, Rui Costa, already showed interest in 2021 in the AVE Global platform, developed by the Instituto Cervantes during the COVID-19 pandemic. “This agreement shows that, despite the repeal of the so-called Spanish Law, the interest in learning the Spanish language in Brazil continues and is very high,” said the consul, referring to the decision of former President Michel Temer to repeal, in 2017, the Spanish Law, decreed in 2005 by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and which obliged schools to offer Spanish as a second language. Temer kept only English as a compulsory foreign language and left it up to the states to decide on the matter.
The AVE Global platform, the consul continued, “makes it possible to circumvent many of the difficulties” for the teaching of Spanish, “such as the lack of teaching staff”. In statements to the same news agency, the director of the Instituto Cervantes in Salvador, Daniel Gallego Arcas, reported that the agreement represents a first step towards the signing of a broader agreement that includes the training of teachers and counselors under a new regional teaching law.
García Montero also signed with the mayor of Salvador (capital of the state of Bahia), Bruno Reis, a collaboration agreement on education, culture and tourism, and attended the inauguration of the José García Nieto library, in honor of the 1996 Cervantes Prize-winning poet. Earlier, on the first leg of his trip to Brazil, the director of Cervantes inaugurated the library in downtown Rio de Janeiro, named Nélida Piñon, in honor of this Brazilian writer, winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, who attended the ceremony.
