Haitian families’ ambivalent relationship to U.S. schools also is not unique, and in particular, these families’ expectation that schools should provide an éducation, and not merely instruction, echoes the findings of […] research with Latino families […] revealed that parents believed the purpose of schooling was for the educación of children. (Doucet 2011)

As a 2nd generation Haitian-American, I can say that the notion that Haitian parents expect their children to get an éducation, as opposed to an “education”, was corroborated by my childhood experience. Growing up in a family of éducateurs

, I was subjected to a mélange of the Haitian (French) education model and the American model – the former starting as soon as I got home from American School. Convinced they could do better, my parents and other family members would modify my curriculum by changing my homework assignments (especially ones that were “too easy”) or teaching me different things, for example. They played this actively subversive role my education, in the pursuit of holding me to the standard that they grew up with, a standard that they had more faith in than they American ones, for their own reasons.

However, despite their intense concern over the quality of my education, they didn’t involve themselves in my schooling in the typical ways. Beyond attending PTA Meetings, my family was a non-presence in my “American” school life. For them, school was strictly a place where you learned what to put on exams to find a career. Everything else was a distraction, including “renmen zanmis” (literally, liking friends) (Doucet, 2721), which I experienced as a cautionary statement, a warning to avoid being caught up in by the social dynamics of the school (or world at large) to the point where it distracts, in any small part, from l’éducation. To that effect, Haitian families’ philosophical understanding of an education/éducation could, in my opinion, be a reason why there seems to be a distance between them and their children’s schools.