14990: Allouard: Re: 14960: Vedrine: Re: Karshan: Feb. 7, 2003 Issue Papers: Education and Adult Literacy (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Philippe Allouard <allouard@libertysurf.fr>

Please!

Are haitian children just a statistical quantity, and is education only
about numbers for us to focuss only upon the percentage of children going to
school?
Having the possibility to help a few children, I do so paying for their
scolarship... As often  as I can spare a moment (it is not often) I check
their lessons, and, sometimes, I had to attend meetings with other "parents"
and the board, or to speak with  some school Principal, the real parents
being, when alive, in the countryside...

I have not enough money to send those children in good private schools, nor
do I have enough contacts and influence to have them accepted in some state
operated "Lycee", usually correct, and far less expensive... therefore they
attend "normal" schools, not too expensive, even if far too much for many
people, and without any real control from the Ministere de l'Education
Nationale.

Sadly, I have to say that for the majority of those children, attending
school is of no help at all except, it's important, and it's the reason why
I am often still paying for it, except the fact that, by going to school,
they have a social status, and avoid being given derogatory names as
"kokorat", "vanipye", "restavek"... They are "eleves" / pupils, and
therefore do exist and are worth something in both their eyes and  other
people's.

But are school there only to provide a social status to their pupils? When I
used to taught, I also used to thought that schools should provide reliable
knoledge, culture, preparation for social life, and, in a way, freedom. I
received both in my family and at school, and taught after this, that
reading is a freedom, that knoledge is a weapon to free yourself, that a
book can be a friend or the way to have a friendship with its author...
Nomatter where you live or when  he lived!

With "my" children, I discovered that in their schools, they learned about
poesie, but never listened to it, about haitian literature, but never read
even a page of it... I discovered that scientific knoledge is absent, or
given in such an abstract way and without order in the lessons that it does
not provide any light upon the way living beings, natural substances, and
the whole world function (not to speak about technical things they use
without having any idea about the way they go, and never being able to ling
their knoledge, when thay have one, with the experience).

I discovered that a teacher is not a "pedagogue", one that held the child by
hand to help him on the way towards knoledge, but a I-know-it-all prince
that never allows questions, never gives explanations, never justify the
scores he gave, and is mainly there to shout at the pupils, have them
beaten, or excluded, and repeating, or, more often, having a pupil writting
on the blackboard, transcription of a photocopy of an old copy of a badly
printed lesson taken from his own teacher, or from a second hand book bought
on the street... How many times did I found that litterature lesson was a
bad echo of the same lesson printed by some port-au-prince teacher in the
50s !!! (I am not joking!!!)

Of course, lessons are given in french, language that the teacher hardly
speaks, and never writtes correctly...

Exams are the worst... the printed paper the pupils have to work, one is
hardly able to read it, for technical reason, but once you managed to
deciffer the letters, you discover that several of the questions are not
understandable (in french)... and for English and Spanish matters, it's
worst. And when  the pupils eventually have their scores, they never have a
chance to look back at their work, nor to work on the answers they gave,
good or bad, nor on the good answers they should have given.

But I am wrong: the worst is that: not once did I help a pupil to reflect on
the lesson he was trying to learn by heart without even trying to understand
it (second point is usually not the goal)... and sometimes to detect a
mistake, a nonsense in the lesson, or just some sentence the sense of whitch
was difficult to catch... At the begining, I encouraged the pupil to go back
to the teacher and to ask for explanations.... I don't do this anymore: the
pupil was usually insulted, often punished for lack of respect towards the
Teacher, and when, seldom, he had an answer, it usually occured that the
answer was either stupid or less clear than the point that led to the
question...

Result is that, as I wrote, I still pay for shcool, but just to do like
everyone, and,  in some cases, I had the pupil not going to school anymore,
but to work, and to some private lessons like Institut Francais... more
expensive but with some results.

Again, here is my small experience, but, believe me, with more than just 2
or 3 children... Definitly, NOW, things being as they are, having 100% of
the children at school would help but a little: the only good point I see,
and, mind, not a small one, would be that it would indicate disparition of
restavek phaenomenon...

Now, if someone have a solution, I would be glad to hear it and to help!

Regards,

                        Philippe