Nano Nagle - Education

Education

As with many members of the Irish landed families, who had remained constant to the Roman Catholic faith, Nano Nagle was sent to France to be educated. Education was being denied to them in Ireland unless they agreed to convert to the Church of Ireland. Nano's life in Paris, where the Nagles had many important social connections, was without a great deal of heed to the plight of the less well off of her country people.

On her return from France she lived in Dublin for a while with her mother, but the deaths, in quick succession, of her father, mother and her sister Anne, caused her to return to her home at Ballygriffin (17??). Here she came to see with painful clarity, how thoroughly the penal laws had done their work, particularly in the material and spiritual degradation of the poor. Exposure to these political realities was significant in her decision to enter an Ursulines Convent in France. There she was gradually persuaded that her life would more usefully be employed among her own people and in her own country where under the Penal Laws access to education was still banned for Catholics.

Read more about this topic:  Nano Nagle

Famous quotes containing the word education:

    If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.
    Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)

    An acquaintance with the muses, in the education of youth, contributes not a little to soften the manners. It gives a delicate turn to the imagination, and a kind of polish to the mind in severer studies.
    Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)

    In my state, on the basis of the separate but equal doctrine, we have made enormous strides over the years in the education of both races. Personally, I think it would have been sounder judgment to allow that progress to continue through the process of natural evolution. However, there is no point crying about spilt milk.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)