Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Education policies
A comparison of education policies east and west of the border of Hispaniola Island
I’ve written before about the immigration policies and immigration histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, contrasting them and examining how they have impacted on the very different current levels of development of both countries.
I tried to illustrate the history of immigration in the DR and Haiti using mostly examples of immigrants, or children of immigrants, who succeeded in politics. Now I want to focus on education, and how education policies have differed between Haiti and the Dominican Republic during their respective histories.
Hispaniola island was the first major island encountered by the Spanish explorers when they reached the Caribbean and so it became the first major Spanish colony in the Americas: Santo Domingo.
Shortly after the conquest of its American colonies the Spanish government realized that ruling half a continent required a vast number of lawyers and administrators, and as a result established several universities for the training and education of its colonial bureaucracy.
In the case of Santo Domingo the University of Saint Thomas Aquinas opened its doors in 1558 in what was then a Dominican convent in the city. This happened just a bit later than the Royal and Pontifical University of the City of the Kings of Lima in Peru and the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, both founded in 1551.
After more than two centuries of activity the universoty was temporarily closed in 1801 during the French occupation of Santo Domingo, and permanently closed in 1823 during the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo.
It wasn’t until 1866 that the Dominican Republic again had its own higher education institution, the Professional Institute in Santo Domingo, organized into faculties of medicine, law, theology and the arts. This was six years later than the founding of the first schools of medicine and law in Haiti, both created under the government of Fabre Geffrard.
At that time - the mid-19th century - the population of Haiti was four to five times greater than the population of the Dominican Republic, and the memory of the previous Haitian invasion compounded with the existence of such a big difference in population and resources between both nations made Dominicans justifiably afraid of the possibility of a new Haitian invasion.
As I mentioned in my previous post, by the mid-19th century the Dominican Republic was more open to the world and had a much larger population of immigrant background than Haiti had. In fact the founders of the Professional Institute, José Gabriel García - already co-owner of a book store and a publishing house - and Emiliano Tejera Penson both had an immigrant grandparent (Italian and English) who arrived in Santo Domingo around the turn of the 19th century. García had already founded a book store and a publishing house in 1862.
At this point it might be a good idea to delve further into the administration of Haitian president Fabre Geffrard (1859 – 1867), who not only established the Haitian schools of law and medicine but also a school of music. Although I can’t verify whether the Frenchman Pierre André Frier was a professor at said school, it seems very likely:
Frier [who studied music in the Paris National Conservatory before joining the Zouave’s Corp] was appointed to a military instruction mission for Haiti, by request of president Fabre Geffrard. Due to Frier’s musical knowledge Geffrard selected him for the task of creating several military bands. Frier and the Haitian president developed a close friendship… In early 1864 Frier was granted permission to return to his home country together with his family…remaining there until October 1865 when they set out for Haiti via Curaçao.
This seems to confirm the intention of Fabre Geffrard to open up Haiti - if only a little - to the outside world, employing foreigners with the goal of improving instruction in the country.
Not only that, but it also seems to imply that given the right conditions more foreigners like Frier might have been interested in settling in Haiti, and just like Frier married into a Dominican family - his wife Asuncion Troncoso Perez being the daughter of a Dominican general exiled to Haiti - other foreigners might have married into Haitian families. It is remarkable if not totally unexpected that Frier’s and Troncoso’s descendants include a renowned Dominican painter, the founder of the first modern soda bottling plant in the DR, and the lawyer, diplomat and provost of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (the current successor to the Professional Institute) Julio Ortega Frier.
The activity of the Professional Institute was not without its ups and downs, including a temporary closure from 1891 to 1895 when it reopens with Archbishop Fernando Arturo de Meriño as its provost. And if it seems unusual that a Bishop should be the provost of a secular educational institution, consider the fact that Archbishop Meriño was also president of the Dominican Republic (1880 - 1882). And this wasn’t an isolated occurrence. Meriño’s successor as Archbishop, Adolfo Alejandro Nouel, was also president (though provisional) of the DR (1912 - 1913).
Priests (or former priests) becoming heads of government is not just a Dominican phenomenon, having occurred in several other countries besides the DR such as Paraguay, Congo, Seychelles, Cyprus and Slovakia. Maybe it was a sign of immaturity in a society not yet capable of producing enough competent administrators to govern and manage its own institutions. But if that is the case, what does the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 say about Haiti ?
The law and medicine schools of Haiti also had their ups and downs in the decades following their creation. In fact it appears as if the law school was not functioning properly at the time of president Lysius Salomon’s rule in the 1880’s:
The Law School was organized by [Lysius Salomon] on a practical basis, so that now it is no longer necessary for Haitians to go to Paris in order to study law.
This reminds us that the dates for the start of the various educational institutions should be taken with a grain of salt, including the foundation date for the Veterinary Medicine school of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo which at first sight appears to have been created by law during the 1930’s but actually began its activity in 1955 with the hiring of four Spanish professors, who were followed by a Peruvian professor hired in 1963 to revise the course curriculum of the school.
A similar case occurs with Haiti’s own Faculty of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine (Université D’Etat D’Haïti) which starts its activity between 1924 and 1934.
Hostos and secular education
During the last decades of the 19th century the education policies of the Dominican Republic veered towards secularism thanks in no small part to the efforts of a Puerto Rican immigrant.
The Puerto Rican educator, philosopher and intellectual Eugenio María de Hostos lived between the years 1879 to 1888 in the Dominican Republic, and during that time he founded the first normal school of the DR, a school for the training of teachers, in Santiago de los Caballeros. Haiti for its part didn’t get its own normal school until 1947.
Hostos was not a practicing catholic and he was opposed to any religious instruction in the educational process, so it seems only natural that his influence in the DR would push Dominican society towards public secular education. And his influence appears to have been very large, including playing a major role in reforming the Dominican educational system, and not limited just to the DR but also to many other Latin American countries were he taught and published.
It would seem Hostos’ influence combined with the mostly liberal governments that the DR experienced during the last decades of the 19th century had the effect of discouraging the opening of private catholic schools, as can be seen in a table of private catholic schools founded in the DR and Haiti from 1860 to 1970.
A few things you might notice from that table are:
Not long after Haiti signed a concordat with the Vatican in 1860, religious congregations (Fathers of the Holy Ghost, Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny, Frères de l'instruction chrétienne de Ploërmel) arrived in Haiti and opened catholic schools. While the Dominican Republic did not have any catholic schools until the 1930’s1.
As far as I can tell there were no catholic schools opened during the US occupations of the DR and Haiti.
The beginning of the Trujillo dictatorship in the DR marks the establishment of the first catholic schools that have survived until the present. For what I read this is no coincidence, as Trujillo facilitated2 the opening of some of these schools.
The start of Duvalier’s dictatorship in Haiti and the end of Trujillo’s don’t seem to have any effect in the opening of catholic schools.
Considering what I mentioned in the previous post about immigration to Haiti, it seems likely the reason Haiti welcomed the priests in charge of those schools was precisely the fact that they were priests, and being celibate (I assume) posed no threat to the commercial and landowning elite of Haiti.
Also, the fact that Trujillo took an interest in the opening of those 15 schools in the DR, when no catholic schools had been opened before in the country, again points to a certain flexibility from the regime when it comes to policies that might create problems for it in the long run - the Dominican bishops published an open letter to Trujillo criticizing human rights abuses in January 1960 - but were good for the Dominican Republic: welcoming qualified immigrants, opening schools, etc, just like I mentioned in the post about immigration.
The US occupations
The fact that no catholic schools were opened during the DR’s and Haiti’s occupation by the United States might be construed as a sign of a lack of concern for education in both countries by the US occupation governments.
But the sources indicate that the US occupation authorities seem to have been particularly concerned with increasing enrollment in primary education - secular and public - and improvements in the finances of both countries helped translate this preoccupation into a real increase in enrollment.
The Haitian budget for education for fiscal year 1914-15, right before the start of the US occupation, was $23,016 dollars. For fiscal year 1919-20 it had increased to close to $400,000 dollars ($360.000 according to other sources). This allowed enrollment to grow from 46,000 in 1912 (before the occupation) to 103,000 in 1929, 14 years into the occupation.
In the case of the Dominican Republic the 1916 (prior to the occupation) education budget was $315,000 dollars. It was increased to $370,000 dollars in 1918 and $962,000 in 1919. Enrollment consequently grew in the DR from 14,000 to 18,000 children to over 100,000 children by 1920.
The larger Dominican budget didn’t result in a larger number of enrolled students due to the higher salaries in the DR than in Haiti, with most of the budget going into teacher salaries and so a lower expenditure per student in Haiti than in the DR. In fact those higher salaries are behind the large migration of poor Haitians to the Dominican Republic that was taking place during those years.
It’s important to remember though that the population of school children in the DR was around half of the Haitian one at the time, and so enrollment as a percentage of population was around half in Haiti than in the DR.
All of this points to Haiti being much less developed than the Dominican Republic at a time, during the 1900’s and 1910’s, when other countries’ involvement with Haiti had been very limited mostly because Haiti wanted them to be very limited. And by less developed I don’t mean just from an educational point of view, with educational institutions being founded at more or less the same time as in the DR despite a much larger population and milestones being achieved later then in the DR, but also an economy that wasn’t capable of producing enough wealth to fund an extensive public education system.
There are two ways to get skilled labor, education and immigration, and Haiti seems to have done very little before the US occupation in terms of educational and immigration policies that would increase the skills of its population.
I would almost go as far as to say that Haiti was caught in a malthusian trap due to this, considering that its population only doubled during the 19th century, while the Dominican Republic’s population increased around fourfold during the same period of time. Even Jamaica which started the 19th century with a higher population density than Haiti increased its population two and a half times.
I think there’s a high probability that one or more catholic schools might have opened in the DR during the annexation to Spain (1861-1865), but if that were the case I would expect them to have closed and left together with the Spanish. In any case no catholic schools from the 19th century have survived until the present in the DR.
For Colegio Quisqueya see https://colegioquisqueya.edu.do/web/themes.iamabdus.com/kidz/1.1/conocenos-historiacolegio.html. For Colegio Don Bosco see https://donbosco.edu.do/nuestro-colegio/.