Comments by Michel DeGraff on responses to his petition on Haitian Kreyòl
As it turns out, these responses echo age-old arguments about the (mis)use of language in Haitian schools and in Haitian society at large. Yves Dejean and many others have addressed such arguments in previous publications. See, for example, Yves Dejean’s 2006 book _Yon lekòl tèt anba nan yon lekòl tèt anba_. As shown in Dejean’s publications, many of these counter-arguments against his petition have been made made and un-made over and over again.
Unfortunately my current schedule won’t allow time to engage in these discussions. The good news is that I have already addressed similar arguments in a couple of mailing lists targeted to (mostly) non-academic types interested in Haiti and to educators and NGOs in Haiti—people who are much closer to the facts (and to the trenches!) of these debates. My responses on these mailing lists seem to apply to the responses that you’ve forwarded to me. So I’ll just cut-and-paste from these earlier posts and add a few more specific comments here an there.
Also see my recent Op-Ed articles in the Boston Globe in the U.S. and Le Nouvelliste in Haiti:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/06/16/language_barrier_in_haiti/
http://www.lenouvelliste.com/articleforprint.php?PubID=1&ArticleID=82891
Re the question “Kreyòl instead of French” vs. “Kreyòl alongside French” and re the comparison between Haiti vs. Germany, Switzerland, etc:
XXX in her post, like many before, has mis-interpreted the fundamental objective of Professor Dejean’s petition and my own position.
Fortunately some of the core issues in XXX’s post are already addressed in the following paragraph in Dejean’s petition—which I would invite XXX and others to re-read:
“Many countries in the world, especially in Africa and Asia, have 2, 3, 4 or more areas that lack a common language. This problem exists nowhere in Haiti. With Creole (i.e., a language that EVERYONE speaks in Haiti) as the language of instruction, all children would be able to study calculus, geography, history, etc., with utmost earnestness. Similarly they will be able to take advantage of any good program for the study of French, a language that has been implanted in Haiti since colonial times.”
Far from us any thought to “limit education” to Kreyòl and impose monolingualism on all Haitians. Our objective is “simply” for Haitian schools to make systematic use of Kreyòl as the language of instruction for all academic subjects, and especially for literacy, This objective is based on decades of research of the beneficial role of the native language as medium of instruction and on the robust fact that Kreyòl is the one language that *every* Haitian in Haiti speaks—and most as their *only* language.
Of course, using Kreyòl as the language of instruction does not prevent any Haitian schools that *already* have the financial means—a minuscule number in Haiti—to look and pay for *adequate* teachers to teach French, Spanish, English… and perhaps even Fongbe, Yoruba, Swahili, Chinese, etc. But all these languages would be taught as what they are, that is as *foreign* languages.
For now it’s not clear to me how many schools in Haiti would even be able to find and pay teachers who are competent to adequately teach French to the general population. The vast majority of Haitian teachers are still not fluent in French. No wonder that after two centuries of education in French (or some version of French) the vast majority of population still cannot speak French. Compare with, say, Spanish-speaking Haitians in the Dominican Republic, English-speaking Haitians in the U.S., French-speaking Haitians in Montreal, German-speaking Haitians in Germany, etc. The issue is clear: in Haiti for the past two centuries there simply has not been any adequate linguistic or pedagogical milieu that would allow Haitians to learn French.
Be that as it may, the education system in Haiti is still struggling to fund basic training of Haitian teachers and publication of Kreyòl text books, especially in mathematics and experimental sciences for the higher grades. So my hunch is that it is such efforts that currently deserve highest priority—efforts to ensure that the majority of Haitian children receive adequate instruction in their native languages so they can gain mastery in other domains, without any linguistic chip on their shoulders.
Another highest priority is a well-informed and massive educational campaign so that teachers, parents and students all understand the value of using children’s native language in their schools as an indispensable basis for building knowledge in all other cognitive and academic areas—as documented in decades of linguistic and pedagogical research.
For some online references on this topic, see:
http://www.unesco.org/education/information/wer/index.htm
Re the claim that French should be used as language of instruction in Haiti because most Haitian parents (allegedly) want their children to learn French in school—let’s assume, for the sake of argumentation, that there’s empirical support for such a claim (I myself don’t know of any such reliable statistics about “most Haitian parents”):
I remember studies going back to the 1940s and 1950s that suggested that most African-American children prefer to play with white dolls instead of black dolls. See, e.g., Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark’s famous dolls studies. For a fictional take on this syndrome, see Toni Morrisson’s “Bluest Eye.” In the Clarks’ studies, the majority of black children found the black dolls bad, dirty and ugly, while the white dolls were considered nice and pretty. And the black children often refused to identify with the black dolls.
In a related vein, there are studies from the 1960s onward that have documented the various ways whereby francophone Canadians in Montreal often look down upon their native French and consider anglophone Canadians superior (see, e.g., Lambert et al’s 1960 article “Evaluative reactions to spoken language” in _Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology_).
The “most Haitian parents wants French” argument could then be extrapolated to these cases to argue for: (i) the massive distribution of white dolls among African-American children, and (ii) the promotion of English over French in Montreal. Fortunately, black civil-right leaders like the Kenneth and Mamie Clark and Thurgood Marshall in the U.S. and pro-French language-policy makers in Québec knew better—though much work remains to be done on both fronts!
And I suspect that most serious scholars would not have used the Clarks’ and Lambert et al’s studies to argue for the widespread distribution of white dolls to black kids and the wholesale adoption of English in Québec. What these studies suggest is that stigmatized groups often internalize the stigmatization they suffer from, thus the need for aggressive policies to combat said stigmatization—be it linguistic or otherwise.
Here’s a quote from Kenneth Clark’s 1965 book _Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power_ about “The Psychology of the Ghetto” (p63f):
“Human beings who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected and granted the ordinary dignity and courtesy accorded to others will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth. Since every human being depends upon his cumulative experiences with others for clues as to how he should view and value himself, children who are consistently rejected understandably begin to question and doubt whether they, their family, and their group really deserve no more respect from the larger society than they receive. These doubts become the seeds of a pernicious self- and group-hatred, the Negro’s complex and debilitating prejudice against himself.”
So I myself would not take the claim that “most Haitian parents want French for their children” (a consequence of external and internalized discrimination) as a serious argument that French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, should be used as language of instruction in Haiti. The use of French as language of instruction for Kreyòl-speaking children in Haiti is exactly what Dejean’s petition argues against. And this petition is one step among others toward fighting centuries of “ghettoization” against monolingual Kreyòl-speakers in Haiti (i.e., the vast majority of Haitians).
Here are some related comments cut-and-pasted from a previous discussion on this topic on another mailing list:
As for the resistance you mention on the parts of parents about Kreyòl-based education: It is a well-established result in social psychology that the oppressed often internalize the stigmatization that is imposed on them by the élites of their society. The Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon has offered many case studies of linguistic insecurity in the context of colonial and neo-colonial societies, with an analysis of francophilia among (wanna-be) francophones in Africa and the Caribbean. The Italian philosopher Antoni