The Madrid public school authorities have set bilingual programmes in place all over the province. They are advertising the programmes in print media, on television and on the radio, and on public transport. A few examples:
Spanish and foreign media have noticed that the campaign is flogging bad grammar--reinforcing a mistake often made by learners of the English language. Has the campaign been dropped? Corrected? Has anyone apologised or admitted the mistake? No. The English may be bad, say the campaign's defenders, but that doesn't matter: the slogan is effective. Who knows if it is? It's now notorious, at least in Madrid. But the decision to run the ads, once taken, couldn't be reversed. To do so would mean admitting that someone had made a mistake, and no-one in Spain ever makes such an admission about policies or how they are implemented.
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