Education of Catholic Girls

RSCJ Mother Janet Erskine Stuart

Description

A century after it s first publication, Mother Janet Erskine Stuart s classic The Education of Catholic Girls is back, and it s as relevant and useful as ever!Practical as it is pious, witty as it is wise, this collection of counsels not only helps educators in school or at home meet Catholic girls special intellectual needs, it offers sage strategies for whole-person formation: showing us how to help our girls grow into virtuous Catholic women. Catholic girls among other girls, writes Mother Stuart, and Catholic women among other women, have the privilege as well as the duty of upholding what is highest.The Education of Catholic Girls will help you teach your girls whether through math and science, needlework, Catholic philosophy, or good manners to uphold what is highest; it will help you train them to live a perfectly honorable and fearless life.This centenary edition of The Education of Catholic Girls features English translations of the original s foreign phrases and quoted sources (Mother Stuart s presumption about her readers knowledge of Latin, French, and German points to something education has lost over the years), as well as a new preface by Catholic homeschooling author and speaker Susie Lloyd.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Open learning
• Catholic Church

Informations

• Publié par: TAN Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618903457
• Langue: English

Extrait

Nihil Obstat: F. Thos. Bergh, O.S.B.   Imprimatur: Francis Cardinal Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster April 21, 1911
Scriptural citations from the Douay-Rheims Bible.
Foreword to the 2011 edition by Susie Lloyd.
Re-typeset and republished in 2011 by Saint Benedict Press, TAN Books.
ISBN: 978-0-89555-907-4
Cover design by Lauren A. Rupar.
Cover image: School Girls Going for a Walk (oil on canvas), Carl Spitzweg (1808–85). Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, Germany, Interfoto, Bridgeman Art Library International.
Printed and bound in United States of America.
TAN Books Charlotte, North Carolina 2011
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
   1. Religion
   2. Character in Girls
   3. Character in Ourselves
   4. The Elements of Catholic Philosophy
   5. The Realities of Life
   6. Lessons and Play
   7. Mathematics, Natural Science, and Nature Study
   8. English
   9. Modern Languages
10. History
11. Art
12. Manners
13. Higher Education of Women
14. Conclusion
Appendix I
Appendix II
A Collection of Classic Artwork
Favorite Prayers to Our Lady
FOREWORD

S OMEONE recently referred to me as a “pioneer,” in light of my long years of homeschooling. Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. Pioneers are brave and confident and willing to strike out on their own. Whereas I have always had a suspicion that there is more in heaven and earth to the job of raising children than is dreamt of in my philosophy.
Oh, it is true that I’m a veteran. With fifteen years of homeschooling down and fifteen to go—if my Kindergarten math is right—I have definitely picked up some useful knowledge along the way. Such as: If you notice that the word “finite” fits neatly inside the word “definitely” you will never confuse it with “defiantly” again. Shakespeare wasn’t always a Shakespeare. His “minor plays”? A euphemism for “the ones that bombed.” My high school suspicions were correct. The question, “When am I gonna use this stuff?” doesn’t always have a good answer.
I’ve also learned some useful things about life. Such as: If you want to get someone’s attention, don’t shout. Just whisper. People will often do the right thing if you don’t try to do it for them first. It is not good that Mom should be alone.
Every useful thing I’ve learned can be summed up in that last one. It’s the real reason I’m not a pioneer. God not only gave parents the Sacrament of Matrimony, He gave us elders to show us the way.
Take this book that you now hold in your hands. An old hardcover copy lay across an upper shelf on a bookcase in my cluttered basement for about ten years—a gift to my husband (Matrimony!) from the Sisters of the St. Louis house of the Society of the Sacred Heart.
I, supposedly an educated Catholic, with a diploma written in Latin to prove it, had never heard of the community. Later I learned that it was founded by St. Madeline Sophie Barat in 1800 to educate Catholic girls in France. The Revolution had done its best to strip and render barren that once-fertile soil in which European Christianity had taken root and flourished. The children of the Church’s eldest daughter desecrated cathedrals, murdered religious, and created a system of spying and denouncement for anyone who dared resist enlightenment and emancipation. Lest the common man remember his heritage, all references to the Incarnation were purged from the calendar. The biblical six-day work week was changed to ten, the years were counted from Bastille Day rather than the Nativity, festivals and holy days (holidays) were removed or changed to honor the Revolution. The old crop of Christianity would be replaced with a new one.
Luckily, by 1800, the Revolution had done everyone a favor and devoured its own. But the cultural wreckage it left behind was like a field on the day after a violent storm. These were the conditions in which the Society of the Sacred Heart began—called by the Holy Ghost to patiently replant and cultivate the Faith in schools for young women. Their students would become the mothers, teachers, and religious of the next generation.
Anyone who has studied history (I have—pick me!) knows that the problem of trying to educate in the midst of barbarism was nothing new. It follows that the Sisters’ remedy was nothing new either: to provide at-risk girls with a Catholic spiritual, moral, intellectual, and cultural formation. It was none other than the perennial tradition of Catholic education: reliable and fruitful, time after time.
Mother Janet Erskine Stuart (1857-1914) was heir to that perennial tradition. By the time she became superior of the Society of the Sacred Heart, she was a veteran educator. But she wouldn’t call herself a pioneer either. She might say she was nanos gigantium humeris insidentes . That’s “standing on the shoulders of giants” to you and me. The Society’s depth of knowledge is evident in my old edition of this book, which bears no translations for the foreign phrases sprinkled throughout. It’s a thing that TAN needed to, ahem, fix for today’s mainly monolingual audience. But who’s embarrassed? Okay, I am.
Her own brief introduction to the work tells us that it is both old and new. As we have seen, “old” is not a problem. We may however, get a little hung up on the “new.” The “new” was hot stuff … in the Britain of 1912. Quick example: she talks of the “educational controversies” playing out in British “council schools.” What controversies? What are council schools anyway?
Don’t be put off. A further reading proves that there is indeed nothing really new under the sun. Those in charge of council schools thought that purchasing better “equipment” was the key to turning out better students. (Sound familiar?) Likewise, many of the other seemingly dated references and controversies mentioned in the book—though we don’t recognize the names and places—reveal timeless issues and struggles that parents and educators deal with even today.
Mother Stuart’s calm, confident response to controversies of her day would be the same if she lived now. She reminds me of the wry old school superior played by Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels .
Mr. Peachtree: “The finest educational minds in the country happen to be on our side.”
Mother Superior: “God is on ours!”
In another hundred years, when No Child Left Behind has been long left behind, who knows what controversies will plague education? It doesn’t matter much what methods come and go. If the focus of education continues to be how to dump facts into a child’s mind, we will continue to wonder why test scores go down while ignorance and apathy go up.
The things that may be measured on standardized tests are not the concern of this book. “It is not so much what we say or do that educates,” Mother Stuart tells us. “What really educates is who we are.” That is why it is relevant to all parents, not just homeschoolers. All of us are called to form our children, whether we send them out of the home for arithmetic, or sit them down to their sums at the kitchen table.
If the job seems daunting, Mother Stuart offers comfort. No one is better fitted for the task of formation than those who give themselves up to it completely and authentically, those with the primary duty, and thus the primary right, to educate: parents. “Children respond to real people.” Who is more real than mother and father?
She is what her title suggests: a mother. That is what I am. That is what most readers of this new edition will be. Mothers are the proper and original audience of this book. She wrote for the Sisters of her congregation. They were all mothers in their classrooms by virtue of their vocations—sacrificing all other rightful aspirations for the sake of God and the children.
Here in secular America, the task for Catholics with daughters remains the same as that of the Society of the Sacred Heart—to plant and cultivate the Faith in our girls. They will be the mothers, teachers, and religious of future generations.

No, I’m not a pioneer. Pioneers go out on their own; I prefer to be taught how to form the hearts, souls, and minds of my girls. I too am a product of a society grown distant from its Christian past. Without someone to show me, I may mistake what seems safe and conservative for what is authentically Catholic. Just when I might, for example, be tempted to mistake quiet, compliant behavior for virtue, there is Mother Stuart calling me to cultivate heroism rather than crusty old Puritanism: “What do we want to bring up? Not good non-entities, who are merely good because they are not bad. There are too many of them already.”
No, it is not good for Mom to be alone. I’ve gained a lot from reading helpful how-to books, from bending the ear of many an experienced mother, and from trying to live up to the common sense my own mother had. Yet I always felt that what I really needed was a visit from a no-nonsense teaching nun, to lay down the principles that would pull it all together.
Then one day I took down this book down from the shelf, blew the dust off, and opened it.
And the nun was there.
S USIE L LOYD —
Susie Lloyd is a popular writer and speaker but she spends most of her time as Mother Superior of her own convent boarding school, homeschooling her six daughters.
Find out more about Susie at: susielloyd.sophiainstitute.com .
PREFACE

W E HAVE had many treatises on education in recent years; many regulations have been issued by Government Departments; enormous sums of money are contributed annually from private and public sources for the improvement and development of education. Are the results in any degree proportioned to all these repeated and accumulated efforts? It would not be easy to find one, with practical experience of education, ready to give an unhesitatingly affirmative answer. And the explanation of the disappointing result obtained is very largely to be found in the neglect of the training of the will and character,