Teaching in local languages is important for children’s rights, anti-discrimination, quality education and equal opportunity for all. Yet Haiti stands out as one of the rare nations in which there is one single language spoken by all citizens, while the school system, by and large, does not use that language as the main language of instruction and examination.
In the 2010–2015 Operational Plan of the Ministry of National Education and Professional Training, the government announced, without any realistic means for implementation, the goal of “balanced bilingualism”—whereby the whole country would eventually become fluent in both French and Kreyòl. This seems like an insurmountable task, given that the country is mostly monolingual and suffers from extreme forms of economic impoverishment. Teachers themselves often do not speak French fluently, and most Haitians have no opportunity to be regularly immersed in any community that speaks fluent French, be it at home or at school—a situation that makes “balanced bilingualism” at a national scale a socially and economically costly pipe dream.
