The Education of Catholic GirlsStuart, Janet Erskine
Religion
The Education of Catholic Girls
Stuart, Janet Erskine
Catholic Church -- Education; Women -- Education
If the children could combine the result of their
observations and bring out a manual of "Teacher Study" we should have
strange revelations as to how it looks from the other side. We should
be astonished at the shrewdness of the small juries that deliberate,
and the insight of the judges that pronounce sentence upon us, and we
should be convinced that to obtain a favourable verdict we needed very
little subtlety, and not too much theory, but as much as possible of
the very things we look for as the result and crown of our work. We
labour to produce character, we must have it. We look for courage and
uprightness, we must bring them with us. We want honest work, we have
to give proof of it ourselves. And so with the Christian qualities
which we hope to build on these foundations. We care for the faith of
the children, it must abound in us. We care for the innocence of their
life, we must ourselves be heavenly minded, we want them to be
unworldly and ready to make sacrifices for their religion, they must
understand that it is more than all the world to us. We want to secure
them as they grow up against the spirit of pessimism, our own
imperturbable hope in God and confidence in the Church will be more
convincing than our arguments. We want them to grow into the fulness
of charity, we must make charity the most lovable and lovely thing in
the world to them.
The Church possesses the secrets of these things; she is the great
teacher of all nations and brings out of her treasury things new and
old for the training of her children. A succession of teaching orders
of religious, representing different patterns of education, has gone
forth with her blessing to supply the needs of succeeding generations
in each class of the Christian community. When children cannot be
brought up in their own homes, religious seem to be designated as
their natural guardians, independent as they are by their profession
from the claims of personal interest and self-advancement, and
therefore free to give their full sympathy and devotion to the
children under their charge. They have also the independence of their
corporate life, a great power behind the service of the schoolroom in
which they find mutual support, an "Upper Boom" to which they can
withdraw and build up again in prayer and intercourse with one another
their ideals of life and duty in an atmosphere which gives a more
spiritual re-renewal of energy than a holiday of entire forgetfulness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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