Creole is the mother tongue in Haiti, but children do most of their schooling in French. Two hundred years after Haiti became the world's first black-led republic, is the use of French holding the nation back?
"The percentage of people who speak French fluently is about 5%, and 100% speak Creole," says Chris Low.
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It's like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold”
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Michel DeGraff
Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT
"So it's really apartheid through language."
Ms Low is co-founder of an experimental school, the Matenwa Community Learning Center, which has broken with tradition, and conducts all classes in Creole.
Educating children in French may work for the small elite who are fully bilingual, she argues, but not for the masses.
Most linguists would share her view - that education in vernacular languages is best - says Prof Arthur Spears, a linguist and anthropologist at City University in New York, and an expert on Creole.
"That is what children arrive at school speaking, and it's obviously going to be better for them to learn in that language," he says.
Michel DeGraff, a Haitian professor of linguistics based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, describes educating children in a foreign language as "a well-proven recipe for academic failure".
He argues that French should be taught in Haiti as a second-language - after children have learnt basic literacy skills in Creole.
"Learning to first read and write in a foreign language is somewhat like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold, and the blindfold is never taken off," he told the BBC World Service.
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