Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolution — John Shaqi
Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolutionKuser, John Dryden
History
Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolution
Kuser, John Dryden
Haiti -- Description and travel
The priests who conduct this institution are certainly as fine a
type of self-sacrificing men who are aiding a truly worthy cause as
I can imagine. They see the tremendous possibilities and without
limiting their efforts to what they could accomplish with a normal
amount of work they undertake almost superhuman attempts. Of the
Brothers who come to Haiti, their average length of life after
arriving is but 12 years, so killing is their work. The normal
amount of work for a professor in the United States is about 18
hours a week, but the Brothers in Haiti teach for 8 hours every
single day. And every effort which they put into it is unwasted and
has a telling effect in the result.
There are 11 grades of scholars taught by the Brothers, from the
earliest kindergarten to the graduation class who would correspond
to high school students. The boys are given work in geography,
history, spelling, French, mathematics and other things which would
be taught in any American school. I looked over the copy books
of the younger boys and the neatness and excellent penmanship of
even children of six was amazing. All of the children seemed to be
naturally gifted at freehand drawing. One little boy of eight, when
asked what his favorite subject was, replied: "My national emblem."
He drew therewith a fine representation of a palm tree.
Although the order of Brothers is French, not all of them are
Frenchmen. Several are Americans, a few Canadians and Portuguese,
and one, a Haitian Brother.
Our third and last visit was to the Ecôle Normale d'lndustrie. The
graduating pupils here act as teachers of the younger ones. This
school is one of the public schools and as we went through it, M.
Bellegarde proudly pointed to a particularly fine-looking little
boy. "That is my son." We went through many classrooms full of
scholars of different ages studying in very much the same way as
children study in America. It seemed a cause for hope to look at
this public school through which the Haitian children were being
made to see the advantages of education and the opportunity to rise.
When every Haitian child will be able to have such instruction and
training then his generation will be able to throw off the yoke of
past superstitions and dispel the ignorance which has been holding
back the masses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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