Educational Review

JANUARY, 1912

THE SISTERS COLLEGE

In the closing chapter of The Education of Our Girls, published in serial form in 1905, and in book form in 1907, the following passage occurs:

"If our Catholic women are to retain their sweetness and refinement, they must be educated by women in schools for women and along the lines demanded by woman's nature. If they are to remain faithful children of the Church, and models of civic and social virtue to the women of the nation, their education must be completed in distinctively Catholic schools. All that is finest and sweetest and noblest in woman withers and dies in coeducational universities from which Jesus Christ and the saving truths of His Gospel are banished. But if our Sisterhoods are to develop women's colleges and help to solve the many pressing problems confronting the homemakers of the future, provision must be made for the adequate training of the Sisters. Here, under the shadow of the Catholic University, there will arise within a few years a Catholic teachers' college for women, to which the various teaching orders will send their most gifted members to receive the highest training that the age affords and to carry back with them to their several communities a knowledge of the latest developments in science and of the most approved methods of teaching."*

*Shields, The Education of Our Girls, p. 290.

Five years ago this statement seemed to many nothing more than the play of poetic fancy and even the most sanguine workers in the cause of Catholic education did not dare to hope for the fulfillment of the prophecy inside of a score of years. But what then seemed so far away is now a blessed reality. To-day the Sisters College is an integral part of the Catholic University of America and it has already won the hearty approbation of the highest authorities in the Church. The Trustees of the University have called it into being and the University professors have generously volunteered to double their labors so that the Sisterhoods of the country might obtain their full share of the blessings which the Church is dispensing to the faithful through this great Pontifical University. The Sisters have already proven their right to a place in the University by the splendid work which they are doing. The professors who are taking part in the work of instructing the Sisters are overjoyed at the rich fruits of their labors which are in daily evidence in the Sisters College.

There are in attendance at the Sisters College six Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary from Dubuque, Iowa; five Sisters of Providence from St. Mary's of the Woods, Terre Haute, Indiana; three Sisters of Divine Providence, from Newport, Ky.; three Sisters of St. Benedict, two from Brookland, D C., and one from Bristow, Va.; two Sisters of Jesus Mary, one from London, England, and the other from Quebec, Canada; two Sisters of St. Dominic from St. Clara's College, Sinsinawa, Wis.; two Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, Scranton, Pa.; two Sisters of the Incarnate Word from San Antonio, Texas; two Sisters of Mercy from Chicago, Ill.; and one Sister of the Holy Humility of Mary from Lowellville, Ohio. The majority of these Sisters have taught in academies and high schools for many years and are setting a high

standard of zeal and scholarship for those who may follow them. They are completing their work in fulfillment of the conditions required for university degrees, which they will obtain in the near future. The needs of the Sisters this first year have made it possible to conduct the work of the college in an unusually small number of courses. Rev. S. W. Fay conducts a course in English and one in Latin; Dr. Maguire, the Professor of Latin at the University, conducts the advanced Latin course; Dr. Bolling, Professor of Greek and Philology, gives two courses in Greek; Dr. Carrigan, the Acting Dean of the Law School, is giving the course in Public School Administration; Dr. McCormick is giving the course in Catholic School Administration and Management; Dr. Landry is conducting two courses in Mathematics; Dr. Turner is giving a course in the History of Education; Dr. Pace conducts the courses in the Introduction to Philosophy and in Psychology, and Dr. Shields gives the courses in Methodology and in the Philosophy and Psychology of Education.

The teachers and the pupils are the essential elements in any school and it would be difficult to find pupils or teachers more in earnest or more enthusiastic than those of the Sisters College. This describes the Sisters College as it is. The Catholic University is not a coeducational institution, and hence the lecture halls of the University are not open to the Sisters during the school year. The generosity of the Sisters of St. Benedict's Convent, Brookland, in providing class rooms for the Sisters has made it possible to carry on the work this year, though it must be confessed the rooms are pitiably inadequate and it is quite impossible to secure proper ventilation. Before the children assemble for school in the morning, during the noon recess, and after the children are dismissed in the evening, the classrooms of the little schoor

are filled with the students of the Sisters College, and as the capacity of this little school is already far overtaxed, it is a grave problem what to do for the coming year. Besides, laboratories and libraries are indispensable for the proper conduct of the work.

The Sisters College is a response to two of the most obvious needs of Catholic education in the United States, viz., the teacher's need of adequate training and the need of system and organization in our Catholic schools. The many grave problems which the deepseated social and economic changes of the past few decades have presented to the schools for solution, demand the highest attainable training in the teachers engaged in all grades of school work. The state school systems have provided for this training by the creation of city training schools, state normal schools, and the departments of education in the various state universities. Our teaching communities have endeavored, according to the measure of their means, to provide normal training for their members, but it has often been felt that this training was insufficient and recourse was had in some instances to the state normal schools and state universities to complete the academic and professional training of at least a few of the Sisters. This, on the face of it, is a strange anomaly. The aim of education in our state schools is to present to the pupils a world from which God is banished and to organize in their minds a system of truth that has no need of Revelation, of divine authority back of moral law, or of redeeming grace. How, then, may a Sister be expected to find in such an institution adequate training for the solution of the problems of Catholic education which are precisely to show God back of all natural phenomena and to read His will in the law engraven on the human heart and proclaimed through divinely constituted channels of authority? Moreover,