Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20)
Rev. Amy Welin:
Who is wise and understanding?
This morning we celebrate the legacy of St Margaret’s School of Waterbury, honoring its heritage and its graduates! For nearly a century, St Margaret’s was supported by St John’s and some of our members of longer tenure may remember that the students participated in worship on Sunday mornings, sitting up in the loft with the girls from Westover School (founded by former leaders of St Margaret’s).
It is difficult for us to think about the education of young women as revolutionary. It was. It is.
In ancient times, women and children were not highly valued. A tragic combination of sexism and high levels of mortality rendered their lives both precarious and surprisingly short. While the average male in first century Palestine lived about 29 years, women had shorter life spans due to the dangers of childbirth, which often began in their mid teens. Education was not accessible. Perhaps three percent of the male population was educated and literate. Most women could not read. With little distinction made between children and adults, the children of the poor were sent to work with adults as early as the fourth or fifth birthday.
Here lies the root of the scandal of today’s gospel: Jesus holds up a child as a role model for those who are quarreling over who is most important. What a surprise! What an insult! Be like this child or you cannot take part in the Reign of God.
Be like a child: vulnerable, curious, open to learning. What a concept.
Educating women was an innovation in 1865, when the Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies (later St Margaret’s School for Girls) opened its doors in Waterbury. At this time, only about half the population aged 5 to 19 attended school at all. Higher education for women was considered unnecessary or even possibly scandalous, because it gave women ideas and was considered a danger to their fertility. We laugh at this today, and 150 years ago, it was the conventional wisdom. Many men did not want educated wives. St Margaret’s offered both preparation for college and secretarial courses for young women in Waterbury. The mission of the school was to provide a complete education for young women. The President of Trinity College identified this as “a very serious need . . . [to provide] of a wider, higher, stronger, more liberal education for young women; and this not only for the very wealthy few who can pay for it.” Located at the corner of Cooke and Grove Streets, the school operated in the center of the city of Waterbury until 1928.
Educating women was expensive. The school was in financial trouble within a decade. Through a general subscription of citizens interested in the enterprise, a sufficient sum was raised to pay off the debt. The leadership of St John’s parish presented the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut for a Diocesan school. A charter was obtained in 1875, and the school was renamed for St Margaret of Scotland, who was renowned for her charity and religious devotion. Assistant rectors of St John’s provided chaplain service to the school for several decades.
The McTernan School for boys opened across the street in 1912. St Margaret’s moved over the Chase Parkway in 1928, and the two schools merged in 1972. Honoring its roots and benefactors in the Chase family, the school changed its name in 2005 to Chase Collegiate School. Today it is an elite independent school.
Educating women – along with men – is one of the missions of the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians tend to be well educated and to support the education of all. Even today, TEC has a missionary sense of serving the poor, as well as educating the children of the affluent. We know that education empowers children, and raises up those traditionally on the margins of society. Education in the Episcopal context at St Margaret’s meant that everyone in the school (regardless of her religious identity) received the same formation of mind and heart, including hearing the King James translation of the scriptures and memorizing hymns. No one had to conform or adhere to belief. She had to know the material.
Today it is more likely that the Episcopal parish will support after school tutoring programs or music education for urban children, and the intention is the same: all children deserve the advantage in life that is offered by a good education.
Education of young women is still revolutionary. And it is still expensive. The tragedy is that in some places, this paradigm has not changed. Note the experience of Malala Yousafzi, the young woman from Pakistan who was marked for death by the Taliban because she pursued an education. After recovering from the assassination attempt, she has worked tirelessly as an advocate for the education of women and has been awarded the Nobel Prize. The world community recognizes that the cost of ignorance is far higher than the cost of education.
If we want the world to evolve into a better place, if we want the lives of our children to be expansive and thoughtful, education is not optional. Be devoted disciples of Christ, who respect and nurture the education of all children. Embrace the Gospel, which is slightly scandalous as it inverts the priority of “what we have always done” and invites a new way of living. The big question for us as a community of faith is how we can support and encourage the education of children in a poor and challenged city, in whose schools many children struggle to learn to read.
How can we lift up the children who play and work in order to learn? The Reign of God belongs to such as these, because they will bring light to others.
Let the Church say Amen!
Resources: National Assessment of Adult Literacy https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp