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Despite the reforms, obtaining an education in Haiti remains an elusive goal for most.

Grading and testing are very strict and formal in Haiti; it is much more difficult to attain a grade of B (or its equivalent) in Haiti than it is in the United States. Therefore, Haitian students may tend to attach great importance to grades and tests, even quizzes. The notion that what one learns is more important than the grade one earns will be very confusing to a Haitian student.

Haiti’s best universities are in wreckage, their campuses now jumbles of collapsed concrete, mangled desks and chairs, and buried coursework. Hundreds of professors and students were entombed, although the exact number of dead is complicated by the fact that class lists and computer registries were also wiped out by the quake.

That protest saved a lot of lives,”

Now, you have to understand, Hattie was a single woman, nearing 60 at the time, and this was the 1960s. She was the polar opposite of ‘cool,' but we hung around her classroom like it was a malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but it was because we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity in an age of uncertainty." 

In January 1989, Friedman started a new assignment as the Times's Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, based in Washington, D.C. During the next four years he traveled more than 500,000 miles, covering Secretary of State James A. Baker III and the end of the Cold War. "Journalism involves a lot of luck—being in the right place at the right time and then taking advantage of it," he once recalled. "I was very lucky to be in Lebanon when it became a dramatic global story, and I was very lucky to be on Jim Baker's plane to have a front-row seat for the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the first Gulf War, and the aftermath of Tiananmen Square." 

literacy rate of about 53 percent (55 percent for males and 51 percent for females) falls well below the 90 percent average literacy rate for Latin American and Caribbean countries