Loreto nun, who has died aged 86, transformed exclusive private school in Kolkata into a model of equal access to education
At Loreto Sealdah, she introduced a system in which half of the girls paid full fees to attend and the other half, from slums and villages in West Bengal, attended for free. The students in the senior classes also acted as teachers in the, a scheme which educates and houses street children with poor literacy and little experience of schooling.
Sr Mooney also set up the Barefoot Teachers Training Programme, which provides teacher training for young men and women from slums and villages near Kolkata who lacked the educational qualifications to be admitted to teacher training colleges. These “barefoot teachers” [a reference to the idea that you don’t need shoes to walk, therefore you don’t need theory to teach] brought primary education to more than 350,000 village children who didn’t have access to education.
Sr Mooney grew up Josephine Ann Mooney, the youngest of three children of William Mooney and Julia in Wolfe Tone Square in Bray. Her father was a farmer and later a foreman on large building projects. Her mother was involved in Cumann na mBan, the Irish republican women’s parliamentary organisation, for a time. As a child, Josephine helped her mother hand out magazines for the Holy Ghost Fathers missions and developed an interest in the work they did.
Sr Teresa McGlinchey, who lived in the Loreto community in Entally, Kolkata with Sr Mooney for several years, said that Sr Mooney was a very competent scientist, artist and writer. “She was a good-humoured person who wrote songs for every occasion,” she said.
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