For the Haiti Challenge, the Architecture for Humanity team provided on-the-ground reports from Haiti.
Words by Stéphane Pierre-Louis. Image by Grace Lau.
In Haiti, we have a very diversified educational system. Though the Ministry of Education exists to set the basic standards of the educational sector in Haiti, the government does not have a well-established infrastructure to apply the guidelines thus it creates a very diverse and unequal educational world. Although our Constitution states that education is a fundamental right and that all should have access to it, the matter, in fact, is very scarce. With the demographic booming that Haiti has witnessed along the last twenty years it has become very hard for the state to provide education to most of its children, therefore we see a growing number of private schools, for better or worse.
It is important to keep in mind that because of that situation one is obligated to pay to go to school, and given the economic degradation of our society, access to school has become a luxury. The less fortunate have to exchange hard physical chores to go to school, for instance, they would agree to clean one’s house or do all the domestic works during the day, just to hope that they will be able to attend night school after a long day of work.
“Ecole” in Haiti is the equivalent of “School”. As in English, it is subdivided into Ecole Privée (Private School) and Ecole Publique (Public school). There are more private schools in Haiti, governed by religious organizations or NGOs. In contrast to the United States, a “collège” in Haiti is a school where both genders are allowed. It can be also referred to as “école mixte”. Besides these differences in title, all these categories have a similar educational system.
The educational system in Haiti is similar to the French system with few differences such as the annual calendar and several focuses in their program. The system is divided into three phases: the pre-primary education (pré-scolaire) for children from three to five years old, the primary education (primaire) that goes from 1st grade to sixth and the secondary education (secondaire) from seventh to twelfth. At the end of both the primary and the secondary education, a state exam is administered to prove that the program of all the previous years has been well covered and assimilated. The exam taken after the primary education, called “Certificat,” determines if the student is ready to go through secondary education. The “Certificat” usually lasts three days with two subjects per day (Mathematics, French, Creole, Geography, History, Experimental Sciences). Three state exams are required during the secondary education: After the ninth grade, the “Brevet” lasts three or four days (testing French, Creole, Experimental Sciences, Social Sciences, English or Spanish, Mathematics) and determines if the student is prepared to continue through the highest classes of the secondary education, where he/she will then be admitted to either section C (or S, for Science) or section B (or L, for Literature). After the eleventh grade (called Rétho), the “Baccalauréat 1” tests the students on what has been covered the previous years and is also a preparation for the “Baccalauréat 2” (Mathematics or Physics, Biology or Chemistry, English, Spanish, Philosophy) that will be taken at the end of the twelfth grade (called Philo –short for Philosophie-). For each exam, the student may choose a French or Creole copy, depending on which language he/she is more comfortable in.
As food is sometimes a more important matter than education for children in Haiti, a lot of them drop out after their primary education and wander on the streets for anything that will provide an income. The most assiduous ones sometimes continue towards the secondary education where the “Brevet” traps many of them. For the ones who make it, their goal is to make it through the “Philo”; then, they proudly call themselves “Philosophes” and don’t seek any further education.
Consequently, a fourth phase, called “superior education” is almost non-existent in Haiti – this is why most students fly to foreign countries in order to pursue higher education after the secondary school phase.
I concluded both primary and secondary education in an all-girl private school run by nuns in Haiti. From all the rules that we had to obey, the system is way more strict than what I’ve experienced in the United States. We’d have daily checks on our uniforms: Low cut socks, skirts above the knee, nail polish, brown belts or shoes instead of black, sneakers, colored eye contacts, heels taller than two inches and braided hair were all reasons to be sent home for days or to get a parents’ conference. In order to eat in the classrooms, considering that it wasn’t allowed, we usually pretended to grab something from our bags just to bend under the bench and quickly throw it into our mouth. Then we’d either just sit there, enjoying the flavor on our tongue or wait until it melted because if we were caught chewing something, it’d be scary. The smallest sanctions were either staying in class while the other students went on break, spending an hour to study very long articles or writing “I will obey the rules” or something equivalent hundreds of times on a paper signed by your parents. We were also graded on two different “subjects”: Discipline and Politeness. If in one school year, a student obtained three times a grade of 5 or less over 10 for one of these subjects, they would be expelled from the school.
When I recently started school in the United States, it was all about surprises. The first time I saw this guy drinking water, so openly, in the classroom, I crossed my fingers and prayed deep down that he wouldn’t get caught by the teacher. When this girl walked out of the classroom without asking for the teacher’s permissions, I was almost offended and thought she wouldn’t be allowed to get back in. It was way too suspenseful until I got used to it.
Most schools offer after-school activities such as basketball, volleyball, soccer (called football in Haiti), drawing and crafting classes, first aid classes, sewing classes, singing classes and cooking classes. There are annual inter-scholar championships where the teams compete against each other.
Education is primarily in French in Haiti but there are efforts being made to make Creole as important in the educational system, for it is said to be the mother tongue of the country in the constitution. Not to mention that back in “middle school” we’d get punished for speaking Creole among us in the schoolyard. Back then, it was just a simple rule in my mind; now I’ve come to see it almost as a prejudice problem.
Haiti has seen the rise of many Haitian intellectuals who’ve planted their dreams on some foreign lands as education is becoming less of a priority in their homeland where food is a luxury. Oftentimes in Haiti, a child’s mind is more set to finding a meal than to learn how to write his or her name and they start to believe that education can’t provide them food. Thus, they lose all interest in being educated and try to put on top of them someone they can relate to. This all reminds me of the latest election, not that I’m saying that Mr. Michel Martelly is an uneducated person but based on the reports of some of his partisans, “Educated people have to lead the country nowhere, it is time to try something new” whereas some people have said that “Mme Mirlande Manigat is too intellectual and the people do not understand a word when she’s addressing them.”
