Afghanistan needs nuns

Frank O’Shea currently lives in retirement at Point Cook, Victoria and adds, for the record, his teaching career (mathematics, mainly) was in a DLS school (Waterford) for five years, CB Chatswood, Sydney for three years, and Marists (Dublin and Canberra) 32 years. He would like to think he was part of a worthy endeavour. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

The Taliban know what they are doing when they ban girls from high school and women from university. A modern society needs educated women, and the Taliban are determined that their country will not be modern, will look for its examples and its rules to an older time.

Wider availability of education has an effect on every society. John Baptist de la Salle recognised that back in the 1700s, an example that was taken forward a century later by Marcellin Champagnat in France and Edmund Rice in Ireland. All were committed to providing free education to the widest possible number of children. (There were established schools like seminaries and those run by Orders like the Jesuits or traditional orders of nuns, but society understood that these were for those who could pay.)

So we come to Australia a century and a half ago. A bothersome young woman, originally from Melbourne, was setting up schools in South Australia and Queensland. She called her teachers ‘sisters’ and put them in nun-like garb, but they were not an official Order and they lived in the community, not in convents. In time, she would run into problems with the male church establishment, but she seemed to be a survivor. In Ireland at the same time, Edmund Rice was effectively kicked out of the Order he had founded, some of his followers insisting that de la Salle was their real founder.

My point, however, is not about these troubles by the founders but I want to write about the effect of what they did. Living in a settled community of senior people, I meet many older women who were taught by nuns, most frequently the Joeys. Sadly, many of the stories are negative ones, as are the stories I hear from some of the men whose schooling was in one of the Brothers’ schools. Books have been written about the harsh treatment of boys in those latter schools, but it is surprising to hear similar if less serious stories of cruelty from girls’ schools.

Perhaps we need to go back to the century before last and the first half of the twentieth century to remind ourselves where we came from and to appreciate the difference the Brothers and nuns made to society when they made education available to the children of the poor. At least one of those Orders took a vow ‘to teach the poor gratuitously.’ A vow!

Today, we live in an educated world and we take for granted that though we may not know the educational background of those whom we meet, we accept that we are all more or less equal. Go back one hundred years and that situation was less sure; indeed, you would not need to go that far back to realise how fortunate we are and how we take for granted the educational standards of
our society.

Of course, this situation is down to enlightened government as much as bodies of dedicated educators but it reminds us of where we started this discussion. That all members of society would be equal is a situation which the Taliban cannot tolerate. There is not much they can do about education of boys and young men, but they can bring the women back to a social position which they regard as endangered by education.

One of the better things Benedict did in his time was to declare Mary McKillop a saint. [/s2If]