French Language In Haitian Culture

Irrespective of the fact that, education is one of the most useful “tools” mankind has been pledged with and can provide individuals with the opportunity of obtaining knowledge, a significant amount of world’s leaders (primarily government officials) did not take seriously the importance of the Haitian Creole literacy and as an immediate consequence a plethora of campaigns related to the topic taken place in the 20th century was underestimated. In keeping with Hebblethwaite, it was not up until the 1970s where the issue came to the fore. Before the 70s and given that Haiti was a colonizes country, only the upper-class population had access to any form of education, in other words the elite had been given the advantage of having a French language-oriented …show more content…
The educational restructuring of Haiti was not completely radical but rather gradual. However, it was significant provided that its ultimate goal was the vernacularization of the French language. Provided that Haiti has been officially recognized as a bilingual country, given the fact that the staggering majority of all Haiti’s residents are familiar with or even fluent in both languages, the implementation of both the French and the Creole language was of paramount importance. Consistent with Benjamin Hebblethwaite, Associate Professor in Haitian Creole, Haitian and Francophone Studies at the University of Florida, his approach to “formal basic schools”, as he titled it, divided the education curriculum into one incorporating nine years of systematic schooling and further subdivided into three “periods”. This education system applied to both the teaching of French and the Haitian Creole languages. For the transition to be as normal as it could be, there were some prerequisites for the embodiment of the two previously mentioned languages. The ability to read and write as well as acquire an adequate level of fluency in the French language had as a major prerequisite the exposure to the created Creole one as it was highly influenced by its dominant one -the French- (Hebblethwait. The vast majority of …show more content…
Reading as well as writing in the Creole language are being taught in the first and second year of an individual’s education however, as years go by and when students are in the position to comprehend more, usually in year three or four depending on the institution, pupils start incorporating the French language as well. Taking into thorough consideration that Haiti was a relatively less developed country of the Caribbean, greater emphasis and focus was placed upon the teaching of the Creole language. The underlying reason for this action being the fact that, according to statistics, more than 54,8 of the population had the tendency of dropping out even before year six. Therefore, the Haitian government insisted heavily on the teaching of the Creole variety based on the premises that all drop-out individuals will have, at least, acquired the most basic literacy