For Haiti: Creole Or French
The Case Against School Instruction in Creole in Haiti.
It is my firm belief that school instruction in Creole in Haiti may not be the best approach for economic development in the country.
Instructions should continue to be conducted in French to preserve the marketability of our students’ diplomas after graduation both at home and abroad and to maintain verbal communication facility with other francophonic cultures around the world — especially the ones on the African continent. Instructions in Creole would be going backward instead of moving forward. The embrace of Creole at this juncture is isolating and self-defeating.
French as the “language of the colonizer” is NOT a solid argument for abandoning a language that has serious scientific discoveries and solid literature to its credit. Such literature, Haiti has richly contributed to. Do you see any serious person advocating for India to abandon English? That is because such a course would be suicidal.
The advocacy for French instruction in Haiti is not a call for abandoning Creole. Creole as a native tongue will exist forever whether we instruct in French, Creole itself, or some other language.
The notion by some in the intellectual elite that the French language has led Haiti into what is called “linguicism” is true. However, that is the case because the educational system has not been prioritized in Haiti through successive, failed, and corrupt governments — not by the fault of the French language itself. (In simple terms, linguicism is defined as: “the unfair treatment of an individual or community based on their use (or non-use) of a favored language.”) To this day, even a decent primary and secondary education remains a luxury in Haiti. If the language is practiced in school and in daily life, in time the language will be spoken fluently by all and understood by most. That is an undeniable fact. And “linguicism” would naturally fade away.
These folks on the Creole instruction side further betray their lack of emotional sturdiness when they shamelessly use as argument: “the physical and emotional harms French Catholic nuns had caused in forcing us to learn the French language” in our adolescence. Here they are lamenting the well-known tradition of Catholic nuns rapping the knuckles of their pupils with a ruler to enforce grammatical French and other disciplines…Please! Heck, we need more nuns — Haitian nuns, this time around.
Their secondary argument is that the parents of these children themselves cannot help their children with their French schoolwork because most of the parents themselves don’t speak French fluently. Really! Do these folks believe that all American or Canadian parents for that matter, can help their children with their homework? Some of the Haitian parents the critics are proposing to relieve of this burden cannot help their children, period — even in the Creole these Haitian linguists and others are advocating for.
This is to emphasize: that we have a generational schooling and education problem in Haiti — not a French language problem.
PhDs have been earned on Creolism. So a veiled form of “circling the wagon” is at play here. Politicians too, are eager to please and placate the uneducated masses as they contort to posture themselves as populist or pro “the people,” to gain their sympathy and their votes.
Some of these politicians themselves cannot correctly construct two grammatical French sentences, even if their lives depended on it. So, Creole itself has become a sacred cow, being protected by both sides. That the cow may not be able to supply the “beef” to the people most in need has become secondary to their ideological agendas and self-interests.
If instruction in Creole is best for our children according to these advocates, doesn’t it stand to reason that Haiti would be better off today had we been providing school instruction in Creole since 1804? Would we? I once posed that very question to a leading linguist. I am still waiting for an answer. Every rational Haitian knows the answer to that question.
As a nation, we must focus on practicality and economic development first and foremost — not on what neatly fits into the theory of a particular class. The question ought to be: which language will facilitate Haiti’s development instead of hindering it? If the answer is French for all the reasons mentioned above, we must double down on educating our children in French, instead of looking back.
After seriously looking at the language issue for practicality through a serious, dispassionate cost/benefit analysis, it may be that French instruction in our schools is NOT the better course. So be it. In that case, we should thoughtfully consider English, following the same path into the future as Rwanda. Digging deeper into the Creole morass is a sure loser if economic development is our top priority.
I am an advocate for what we need and what will work. This is no time for cultural sentimentality and what appears to me as a form of “linguistic revanchism” by the pro-creole elite as our country has fallen behind in every conceivable category.
Let’s spend our meager resources on educating our people in a marketable language instead of condemning them to Google their way of finding out what the rest of the world is saying and doing with the help of an electronic translator. This is the surest way of producing followers instead of the future leaders of Haiti.
Plus, Creole will be just fine. I believe it is unperishable.
Guerton “Babi” Auguste is a son of Haiti and a resident of Boston MA.
