15826: Allouard: Re: 15813: Ventres: French to be taught in Pam Beach County (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Philippe Allouard <allouard@libertysurf.fr>

Question is open... and therefore

Does Haitian culture exist in creole only?
"Le charme des apres-midi sans fin", from Laferriere, is written in the most
precise and most concise... in the most perfect modern French... but is it
not a recent jewel added in the crown of haitian culture? And should not any
haitian be proud having such a good writter in his culture?

Letters from Capois, Christophe, Petion, Toussaint and others, written in an
exquisite French should they be out of reach of Haitian pupils because not
written in creole? Culture is also about roots, and ability to understand
those...

When I lived in France, pupils were able to learn latin and greek and old
French because of this... And it is/was a way for poor but intelligent
pupils to become after this more intelligent and famous and influent than
the ones who were before wealthier than themselves...

But culture is not only a way to go up on the social scale... it is before
that an element of freedom:
I am not enslaved by the latest news,
I am not an easy victim for the first demagogic politician,
I can be a real actor of my country political life when I know and can try
to understand what happened BEFORE, long ago, and when I KNOW THERE WAS
THINGS TO HAPPEN BEFORE...
And this freedom is possible only through knowledge, and access to the
original language of historical and litterary sources seems to me the very
condition of this knowledge... When I live whith the unexpressed idea that
life began only with my mother or my grandmother, when I have no way to
mesure passed times and events, when I am not able to know there were other
governments before the one before the actual one, other writtings etc. When
I am not able to know what history means because all that existed before me
is confused and I am not able to distinguish between my great-grand-mother's
time and Toussaint's time, could you believe I am really free? I am depossed
of my own culture, I am not able to connect to my own roots...

And, in Haiti, linking to the haitian roots goes partly through French... It
does not seem to me a problem but a fact... problems begin when the fact is
denied...

Please excuse my passion... but, as a teacher, it is perhaps one of the most
excruciating experience that, French, I know more about haitian history than
any of my neighbours less than 25 years old...  And I don't know a lot...
Nevertheless, everytime I tested it, I saw the pupils in the area failing to
pass...

I am not sure if teaching should be in French or in Creole in Haiti... but I
am sure that having French becoming only a foreign language won't help the
pupils to be Haitians, because this will impeach them being the legitimate
owners of this part of their culture that is expressed in French... Why
should haitian being strangers in their own culture? Would you imagine
Canadians refusing both English and French because they were once the
languages of their foreign masters?

[I know Haitian situation is VERY different, but it sometimes help to
transfer the problem in another context, doesn't it?]

Best regards to the Corbetters...

                                                        Philippe