Page:Haiti- Her History and Her Detractors.djvu/298

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
266
Haiti: Her History and Her Detractors

where the teaching is conducted on the lines of the curriculum adopted by the Secretary of Public Instruction. Among the most important of these establishments at Port-au Prince are the College Louverture, the Petit Séminaire Collège, under the management of the Fathers of the Holy Ghost; the Institution Saint Louis de Gonzague, the Pensionnat Sainte Rose de Lima; an orphanage where the girls are taught manual trades; a school for practical sciences, a Wesleyan school for boys and girls, a maternity which furnishes competent midwives, and the Clinique Péan, where the students receive practical and technical instruction in medicine. At Cayes and at Cap-Haitien there are private law schools.

The Republic of Haiti, ever anxious to encourage the diffusion of public instruction, subsidizes all these private schools, without mentioning the bursaries she maintains in France and elsewhere. Whilst being most liberal in a financial way, she reserves the right of conferring degrees. No students of the private schools of medicine, law, etc., can be graduated without passing an examination of the Board of National Schools and having their diplomas signed by the Secretary of Public Instruction.

From a budget amounting to $7,000,000 Haiti's yearly expenditure for public instruction is $800,000. When one considers that in 1844 there were but four national schools in the whole arrondissement of Port-au-Prince,[1] it is easy to form an idea of the marvellous progress which has been made since in that line; for at the present day, not including the Lycée and other high schools, there are in the city of Port-au-Prince alone ten public schools under the management of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, one Lancasterian school, five lay schools, one school for classical education for boys, whilst for girls there are eight primary schools and one school for classical education, to say nothing of the numerous private schools.

  1. Linstant-Pradine, Lois et Actes, 1843-1845, p. 416.