Education
Although public education is free, private and parochial schools provide around 75% of educational programs offered. Less than 65% of children of primary school age are actually enrolled. At the secondary level, the figure drops to 55%. Of those enrolled in primary school, 63% will complete it. On average, it takes 16 years to produce a single graduate of the 6-year cycle. Though Haitians place a high value on education, few can afford to send their children to secondary school. Remittances sent by Haitians living abroad are important in paying educational costs.
In the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, home to 2.21 million of Haiti's 8.5 million people, only 23 percent of adults have completed secondary school with 16 percent passing the state graduation exam. More than half (53.5 percent) of children aged 5–17 do not attend school.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Haiti
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)