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:
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)