Istwa Nou

The original occupation treaties said nothing about education, an omission Rayford Logan called almost inexplicable, and the Service Technique became the American attempt to repair it. What existed in 1915 was two systems. Government schools enrolled about thirty thousand pupils, largely on paper, staffed where staffed at all by appointees who could not read. Religious schools, mostly Catholic, taught about twelve thousand and belonged to the elite, apart from a hundred or so presbyterial schools where Breton priests gave a few thousand peasant children the rudiments. Three obstacles stood in the way of anything better. The peasantry saw little use in it. The elite feared what an educated Black majority would do, and feared more that such a majority might prefer foreigners who fed them to Haitians who did not. And teachers taught in French, the language of advancement, to children who spoke Kreyol. Dantes Bellegarde then made Haitian education a national redoubt against further American encroachment. Keeping peasants illiterate suited everyone with the power to change it.