The Education of Catholic GirlsStuart, Janet Erskine
Religion
The Education of Catholic Girls
Stuart, Janet Erskine
Catholic Church -- Education; Women -- Education
But the kingdom of woman is on that borderland, and if she comes down to
earth to claim its lowland provinces she exposes herself to lose both
worlds, not securing real freedom or permanent equality in one, and
losing hold of some of the highest prerogatives of the other. These may
seem to be cloudy and visionary views, and this does not in any sense
pretend to be a controversial defence of them, but only a suggestion
that both history and present experience have something to say on this
side of the question, a suggestion also that there are two spheres of
influence, requiring different qualities for their perfect use, as there
are two forces in a planetary system. If these forces attempted to work
on one line the result would be the wreck of the whole, but in their
balance one against the other, apparently contrary, in reality at one,
the equilibrium of the whole is secured. One is for motor force and the
other for central control; both working in concert establish the harmony
of planetary motion and give permanent conditions of unity. Here, as
elsewhere, uniformity tends to ultimate loosening of unity; diversity
establishes that balance which combines freedom with stability.
Once more it must be said that only the Catholic Church can give perfect
adjustment to the two forces, as she holds up on both sides ideals which
make for unity. And when the higher education of women has flowered
under Catholic influence, it has had a strong basis of moral worth, of
discipline and control to sustain the expansion of intellectual life;
and without the Church the higher education of women has tended to
one-sidedness, to nonconformity of manners, of character, and of mind,
to extremes, to want of balance, and to loss of equilibrium in the
social order, by straining after uniformity of rights and aims and
occupations.
So with regard to the general question of women's higher education may
it be suggested that the moral training, the strengthening of character,
is the side which must have precedence and must accompany every step of
their education, making them fit to bear heavier responsibilities, to
control their own larger independence, to stand against the current of
disintegrating influences that will play upon them. To be fit for higher
education calls for much acquired self-restraint, and unfortunately it
is on the contrary sometimes sought as an opening for speedier
emancipation from control. Those who seek it in this spirit are of all
others least fitted to receive it, for the aim is false, and it gives a
false movement to the whole being. Again, when it is entirely
dissociated from the realities of life, it tends to unfit girls for any
but a professional career in which they will have--at great cost to their
own well-being--to renounce their contact with those primeval teachers of
experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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