[Olpc-Haiti] "Cr-Aiole, icole, rationaliti"

Michel DeGraff degraff at MIT.EDU
Thu Jun 26 15:38:36 EDT 2008


Dear all,

Here's a more recent article (published in 2006, by Yves Dejean)
that will complement the Kleifgen article I sent a couple of days
ago on "Kreyrl li, kreyrl ekri: Haitian children and computers."
In this piece titled "Schools, Haitian Creole and Irrationality"
Dejean analyzes the (non)use of Haitian Creole in the education
of Haitian children---another set of issues that seem most
relevant to the OLPC project in Haiti.  Dejean's writings should
help put the OLPC-Haiti project in a broader linguistic,
educational and historical perspective, and help us understand
some of the fundamental problems that have undermined "education
for the majority" in Haiti.

The article can be read online at:

  http://www.tanbou.com/2002/fall/CreoleEcoleRationalite.htm

The article is quite long and loaded with detailed argumentation
that may not be of great interest to non-linguists.  So, for
starters, you may want to skip sections 2 and 3 ("Changer le nom
de la rose?" and "Qui parle frangais?"), move directly to Section
4: "Article 5 et rationaliti", and keep reading from there.

Yves Dejean is currently in Port-au-Prince, and will certainly be
happy to share further thoughts with those of you who are, or
will be, in Haiti.

And for those who can read Haitian Creole, there's also Dejean's
longer treatise written in Haitian Creole: _Yon lekrl tet anba
nan yon peyi tht anba_ ("An upside-down school in an upside-down
country") published in 2006.

My hunch is that such reports will make OLPC and similar projects
stand a better chance to help put education in Haiti upside
up---"education for the majority" indeed, at long last.

An amazing prospect!

                                 -michel.
_____________________________________________________________________
MIT Linguistics & Philosophy 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139
degraff at MIT.EDU http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff
_____________________________________________________________________


More information about the Olpc-haiti mailing list