Below, Professors Michel DeGraff and Haynes Miller describe what motivated them and their colleagues to create the MIT-Haiti Initiative.
Poverty and language barriers exclude a large part of Haiti’s population from high-quality education—especially those in remote areas and even many in urban areas. Since Haiti’s founding in 1804, Kreyòl has been mostly absent from documents and formal spaces that produce and transmit knowledge, while French has been the language prevailing in schools and universities, public and private institutions, courts, banks, print media, and elsewhere. This creates deep division, since 100% of the population speaks Kreyòl while only a very small percentage (in the single digits) speak French at home.
We created the MIT-Haiti Initiative because we believe Kreyòl can be used in a robust teaching model based on interactive pedagogy to help more people get access to high-quality education. The Initiative is intended to offer alternatives to the tradition of rote memorization with little understanding and to the social exclusion that has hampered the country’s development for more than two centuries.
