Petition on Haitian Kreyol

[Leila Monaghan]

Hi, a petition to the Haitian government to have Kreyol as a language of
schooling.  Please see below for contact information.

all best,

Leila

Dear friends and colleagues,

We ask that you please take time to read, sign and distribute Professor Yves
Dejean's urgent public petition about  school reform in Haiti.

The petition is available online at:

http://ayiticheri.com/rebati/ --- courtesy of indefatigable Web Designer
Jean-Pierre Barthélémy.

If you sign the petition, you will receive an automatic message from the
email address of Jean-Pierre Barthelemy.  This email will ask that you
please click on a website to confirm your email address. After you click on
this website, and your signature will appear under the petition.

Here's why we think Professor Dejean's petition deserves as much support as
possible:

With all the billions and the vast efforts that are now being invested in
the reconstruction of education in Haiti, now is the time to solve one
fundamental problem that has plagued Haitian schools since the country's
birth.  This problem concerns the misuse of language in Haiti's schools.
 This is a problem that Haitian governments since the 1980s have been
confronting with only limited success to date.  So we need to gather as much
momentum and public consciousness as possible to address this problem with
the necessary efficacy.

Indeed, by all accounts, Haitian schools are still not making optimal use of
Haitian children's native language of Kreyòl.  Most school books and most
school exams are still in French, a language that the vast majority of
Haitians, including the vast majority of Haitian teachers, do not adequately
speak and understand.  Such a paradoxical and exclusionary practice is a
consequence of Haiti's past as a French slave-based plantation colony and
its unjust neo-colonial legacies.

This practice of teaching and testing Kreyòl-speaking children in French
goes against pedagogical best practice and scientific results that have
accumulated in more than 50 years of research in linguistics and in
education.   Teaching and testing in a language that the vast majority of
Haitians do not speak is one reason why Haiti's education system has failed
most Haitians throughout the country's history.  In turn, this language
barrier and the attendant educational failure are at the root of  much
socio-economic inequity in Haiti.

We thus ask that you take a public stance against such blatant injustice:
 Please sign Professor Yves Dejean's petition at
http://ayiticheri.com/rebati/ and  invite  friends and colleagues to do so
as promptly as possible.  Once the petition has collected enough signatures,
it will be forwarded to Haiti's government officials, NGOs, media outlets
and other institutions that are trying to usher some of the educational
reforms that Haitian children desperately need.

The petition was written in Kreyòl by Professor Dejean, then translated into
English and French by Professors Michel DeGraff and Hugues Saint-Fort,
respectively.  Jean-Pierre Barthélémy designed the website for the petition
at http://ayiticheri.com/rebati/

In solidarity for Ayiti cheri,

Professor Michel DeGraff, MIT
Professor Hugues Saint-Fort, City University of New York


                         -michel.
____________________________________________________
Michel DeGraff
MIT Linguistics & Philosophy
77 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge MA 02139
degraff at MIT.EDU
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff
____________________________________________________

-- 
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Anthropology
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyoming