This article argues that Haiti’s French-dominant school system is an impediment to the nation’s development, whereas Haitian Creole-dominant education will lay the foundation for long-term development. In that Caribbean country, 95% of the population is monolingual in Haitian Creole while the portion that additionally speaks French does not exceed 5% with an additional 5–10% having some receptive competence (Valdman 1984: 78; Dejean 2006). Even though French is the language of the school system, as many as 80% of Haiti’s teachers control it inadequately and only a minority of students completes school (Dejean 2006). Economic, historical, sociolinguistic, and demographic factors are a part of the explanation for Haiti’s low educational achievement. Another important but often ignored factor is educational language policy. Data on educational language policy compared internationally show that the use of a second language in schools correlates with high illiteracy rates and poverty (Coulmas 1992). I reject arguments in favor of maintaining French-dominant education in Haiti (Lawless 1992; Youssef 2002; Francis 2005; Ferguson 2006, etc.) because the resources for it are woefully lacking. I argue that the progressive promotion of Haitian Creole throughout Haitian education will lead to improved learning, graduation, and Creole literacy, in addition to a more streamlined and coherent State, economy, and society (Efron 1954; De Regt 1984; DeGraff 2003; Dejean 2006). As Haiti rebuilds after the earthquake of January 12th, 2010, aid workers, government employees, and researchers who get involved in the recovery also unsuspectingly perpetuate French, English, and Spanish hegemony in development work (DeGraff 2010). The long history of suppressing Haitian Creole and promoting French in education and administration — and French, English, or Spanish in development work — form underlying obstacles in the nation’s struggle to produce an adequate class of educated citizens, to achieve universal literacy, and to make socioeconomic progress.
2018. Haiti’s Language-in-Education Policy: Conflicting Discourses at the Local Level. In Conceptual Shifts and Contextualized Practices in Education for Glocal Interaction [Intercultural Communication and Language Education, ], ► pp. 37 ff.
Bouchard, Marie-Eve
2019. Language shift from Forro to Portuguese: Language ideologies and the symbolic power of Portuguese on São Tomé Island. Lingua 228 ► pp. 102712 ff.
Bouchard, Marie-Eve
2022. Redefining Forro as a marker of identity: Language contact as a driving force for language maintenance among Santomeans in Portugal. Multilingua 41:1 ► pp. 85 ff.
Bouchard, Marie-Eve
2023. “We have that strong R, you know”: the enregisterment of a distinctive use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2023:279 ► pp. 233 ff.
Coupet, Sarah Q. & Guerda Nicolas
2017. We Drank the Cola in Collaboration. In Handbook of Research on Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence and Social Justice in Teacher Education [Advances in Higher Education and Professional Development, ], ► pp. 159 ff.
Coupet, Sarah Q. & Guerda Nicolas
2018. We Drank the Cola in Collaboration. In Teacher Training and Professional Development, ► pp. 620 ff.
DeGraff, Michel
2016. Mother-tongue books in Haiti: The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and in reading to learn. PROSPECTS 46:3-4 ► pp. 435 ff.
Guzmán, Juan Carlos, Kate Schuenke-Lucien, Anthony J. D’Agostino, Mark Berends & Andrew J. Elliot
2021. Improving Reading Instruction and Students’ Reading Skills in the Early Grades: Evidence From a Randomized Evaluation in Haiti. Reading Research Quarterly 56:1 ► pp. 173 ff.
Hebblethwaite, Benjamin
2015. The Scapegoating of Haitian Vodou Religion. Journal of Black Studies 46:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Lachaud, James, Daniel J. Hruschka, Bonnie N. Kaiser & Alexandra Brewis
2020. Agricultural wealth better predicts mental wellbeing than market wealth among highly vulnerable households in Haiti: Evidence for the benefits of a multidimensional approach to poverty. American Journal of Human Biology 32:2
Past, Mariana & Benjamin Hebblethwaite
2014. Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti: Considering the stakes of Trouillot’s earliest work. Cultural Dynamics 26:2 ► pp. 149 ff.
Regus, Marjoris & Teresa Satterfield
2023. Where is Mi Gente? Codeswitching (Afro)Latinidad in the music classroom. International Journal of Music Education
Smith, Patriann & Alex Kumi-Yeboah
2015. Consolidating Commonalities in Language and Literacy to Inform Policy. In Handbook of Research on Cross-Cultural Approaches to Language and Literacy Development [Advances in Linguistics and Communication Studies, ], ► pp. 393 ff.
Taber, Robert D.
2015. Navigating Haiti's History: Saint‐Domingue and the Haitian Revolution. History Compass 13:5 ► pp. 235 ff.
2022. French and Kreyòl in multilingual Haiti: insights on the relationship between language attitudes, language policy, and literacy from Haitian Gonâviens. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 19:2 ► pp. 163 ff.
2017. Multilingual Students and Language-as-a-Problem Oriented Educational Policies: A Study of Haitian-American Generation 1.5 Students’ School Language Experiences. NABE Journal of Research and Practice 8:1 ► pp. 60 ff.
Yilmaz, Tuba
2021. Translanguaging as a pedagogy for equity of language minoritized students. International Journal of Multilingualism 18:3 ► pp. 435 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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