The Education of Catholic GirlsStuart, Janet Erskine
Religion
The Education of Catholic Girls
Stuart, Janet Erskine
Catholic Church -- Education; Women -- Education
One of the problems which beset school education, and especially
education in boarding schools, is the difficulty of combining the good
things it can give with the best preparation for after life. This
preparation has to be made under circumstances which necessarily keep
children away from many of the realities that have to be faced in the
future.
To be a small member of a large organization has an excellent effect
upon the mind. From the presence of numbers a certain dignity gathers
round many things that would in themselves be insignificant. Ideas of
corporate life with its obligations and responsibilities are gained.
Honoured traditions and ideals are handed down if the school has a
history and spirit of its own. There are impressive and solemn moments
in the life of a large school which remain in the memory as something
beautiful and great. The close of a year, with its retrospect and
anticipation, its restrained emotion from the pathos which attends all
endings and beginnings in life, fills even the younger children with
some transient realization of the meaning of it all, and lifts them
up to a dim sense of the significance of existence, while for the
elder ones such days leave engraven upon the mind thoughts which
can never be effaced. These deep impressions belong especially to
old-established schools, and are bound up with their past, with their
traditional tone, and the aims that are specially theirs. In this they
cannot be rivalled. The school-room at home is always the school-room,
it has no higher moods, no sentiment of its own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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