The School System in Haiti (Education)

Reflections of Jean Baptist Anaika and Wakine Lartigu

In a country where 70 to 80% of the population is uneducated, the school represents the future. From it the population awaits great hopes; it is the only means of access to the culture, it transmits the values and symbolizes the change for a whole people. However in a company in full change, shaken by political crises and social with repetition, the school cannot any more is satisfied with its role of sorts and reproduction of the elite. It has a duty towards its people and must adapt to the sociological change. Does the Haitian education system fill its function?

In Haiti, we cannot speak about an education system which would achieve its public duty, answering the satisfaction of the country: To train the young people and to give access to them a profession. Quite to the contrary, the school network is multiple and complex. A large machinery with social exclusion; Many of these schools belong to a sector known as "abstract", they are not controls for more the share by any law. Everyone or almost can improvise "professor" of the schools. Like teaching equipment? The alphabetical one, tree umbrages will act as roof, some benches, and a piece of board as a table...

Parallel to these anarchistic schools existing the private sectors: nuns or laymen of whom the natural life will depend on financial means and of the quality of their services

Each year, of many students arrive on a market already encumbered unemployed without real luggage. Difficult under its conditions of putting the chances on its side in a country where the selection is harder, the schools lavishing a teacher of quality with qualified professors are far from numerous. The director Founder school of Sopudep always remind us who makes the Institution in function today is the help of some good heart people in Solidarity with Sopudep without forgotten Sister Melissa / Family Zawatzky Foundation in Canada. Moreover the expenses of schooling are inaccessible to the great number. Only the average and the upper middle classes can face there. Moreover, the provinces are completely forgotten... 2/3 of the secondary schools and professionals concentrate in the big cities of which a good part in the capital.

How the provincial ones can face the traveling expenses, of residences, where they have only just what to stay put?

The minister of Education makes an attempt of reform to the education system, reforms been sulky by the concerned ones. Indeed how to make the opposite when financial means, structural and technical ones are not joined together to make it possible the schools to normally function? In addition how a state staggering like that of Haiti, shaken by coups to repetition and more worried by the needs for the middle-class minority can - it to grant any importance to the formation of its youth which however composes most of its population? (More half of the population to less than 25 years)

Many students are attracted by professions known as intellectual: doctor, lawyer, agronomist, and especially... philosopher. But reality is very different. What can make a philosopher in Haiti? To teach? With a little chance, speak out on the practices of the government? Still yes, but with one rather short lifetime because if the word "freedom" is registered recently in the constitution; it is only registered by it... for the form.