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:
“Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)