While today’s women do not face the same obstacles to higher education as their grandmothers, they still face a darkness that it is the role of Catholic institutions to help them move through, UNDA Vice Chancellor Celia Hammond told the Catholic Women’s League Australia national conference. The following is an edited version of her speech.
Let me start by saying I am delighted to be speaking at this conference. My father’s mother, (Noreen Hammond, nee Kelliher) my grandmother, who died when I was 6, was a devoted member of this association many years ago. Although my father did not elaborate, I suspect that this association, the friendships she formed through it and the community it gave to her were vital to her during her adult years. Although I was very young when she died, I still have warm memories of my grandmother, her house in Kimberley Sreet, Wembley, her piano and the stairs leading up to the front door.
I still remember the day she died. I, at age six, was out bouncing a ball on the red painted patio of our house in Northam when my mum came out to tell me. I don’t recall my response, but the fact that I remember being told suggests that it was a defining moment in my young life. From what I know, like many, many women of her generation, my grandmother did not have an easy life.
She raised five children, 16 years apart in age, with a husband who was frequently away working. I know that money was tight, and that my father and his siblings had to do things tough (eg – like walk miles to school – a memory that my father frequently refers to when trying to explain to us all how easy we have had life).
It is almost impossible for me to compare my life with what I imagine to be the life of my grandmother. Indeed, it is very difficult for me to compare the life I have led to date with the lives led by my parents at a similar point in time. The world in which I have grown up is vastly different from the world of my parents, and almost unrecognisable from that of my grandmother. While not over indulged with material goods, and while having comparatively strict parents, I cannot remember life without a television or a telephone.
I have no idea of what it is like not to have enough to eat. I always had good clothes – albeit, being the third of four girls I did suffer a number of “hand me downs”, but this was not common. I had ballet lessons, I did Little Athletics, I had piano lessons and tennis lessons (I hasten to add – not all at the same time … we had strict rules about “one extracurricular activity”).
We went out to dinner most Friday nights – or had takeaway fish and chips. My parents both had cars – not fancy – but good, solid family cars. We went on holidays to Rottnest every couple of years and we had the occasional outing to the movies. We went to Mass every Sunday and while we didn’t have “Sunday best” clothes, the wearing of jeans was strictly taboo. However, it is not only the comparative affluence in which I grew up which distinguishes my life from that of my grandmother’s.
A very significant difference is that I was born into an environment in which there was access to education and that educational achievement was encouraged. Education was valued. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding, of truth and wisdom, was not only legitimate, but indeed encouraged and fostered.
This was brought home to me recently when, in one of those strange twists of fate, I met a distant relative from Queensland. He made the observation that my great-grandfather, a poor potato farmer from Ireland, came to Australia with very little education and simply a desire for a better life. A couple of generations later, his grandson, my father, became a judge and his great-grand daughter became a lawyer and is now a Vice Chancellor of a Catholic university. His point was not to sing our praises, but rather to sing the praises of Catholic education in this country. He rightly pointed out that this story is not unique.
Australia has a very long and successful history of Catholic schooling. The nuns, brothers and priests who came to Australia in the early years created a system, first of primary Catholic education and then secondary education, which has flourished over the last 200 years. It has flourished despite (or perhaps in part because of) the battles fought by many over the years to ensure that the right to choose Catholic education was retained and to ensure that there was funding for it. In recent years I have met and worked with some of these “fighters”, including Peter Tannock, Br Kelvin Canavan and Mgr Tom Doyle.
They were not alone – but they are shining lights in the history of Catholic schooling in Australia.
Higher education and women
I could speak at length about the vitality and importance of Catholic schooling and what it has provided to men and women over the years. Today, however, I would like to focus briefly on higher education: more specifically, on women in higher education and the significant role a Catholic university can play in the post-school education of women.
• Today, in Australia, approximately 55 per cent of all students enrolled in higher education are women (and it should be noted here, women make up 50.3 per cent of the total population of Aust: 10,700,779). In 2006, there were 984,100 university students – domestic and international in 39 universities, and 1,600,000 VET students.
• 7.47 million Australians have post-school qualifications (both higher education and VET) and of these, 3.65 million (or 52.6 per cent) are women.
• Women with post-school qualifications are more likely to have Bachelor level qualifications and males are more likely to have Cert III.
• Women are more likely to have qualifications in Management and Commerce (a third of all women qualifications); then Society and Culture and finally Health and Education (3:1 women to men)
• Men are more likely to have qualifications in Engineering-related technology, then Management and Commerce and Architecture and Building.
The 2006 Census of Australia clearly shows that the rise of females in post-school education has been comparatively recent. The census shows that in 2006:
• Of those born before 1946, 13 per cent of women had bachelor level qualifications or higher compared with 18.5 per cent of males.
• This discrepancy evened out for those born between 1947 and 1966 – where 20 per cent of women had Bachelor level or higher qualifications compared with 19 per cent of males.
• The truly dramatic change occurs in the group born after 1966: in 2006, 28 per cent of women had bachelor level qualifications or higher compared with 21 per cent of males.
The impact of women’s participation in higher education
When you consider these statistics, the obvious question arises: what is the impact, and what are the consequences of women’s increasing participation in higher education? While this is the obvious and indeed a very interesting question, it is also inherently dangerous because a simple reliance on these statistics alone, without a wider consideration of all other sociological information, would be misleading and wrong. For example, I can tell you without fear of statistical contradiction:
• Women get married later, have children later and have fewer children.
• They are more likely than ever before to co-habitate with a partner before marriage.
• The divorce rate, while dropping slightly in recent years, is far higher than 30 years ago – and almost half the divorces in Australia involve children under the age of 18.
• Women born between 1947 and 1986 are more likely to be in paid employment outside the house than to be out of the paid workforce.
But, as I just noted, it would be misleading, wrong and dangerous to draw the conclusion that all of these facets of modern life are attributable to the higher level of education undertaken by women. I do believe that education is one of many factors that contributes, at the very least, to the workforce participation rates, the later marrying age and the lesser number of children – born at later periods in life. However, I do not assert this as a fact – nor would I ever attempt to “calculate” the significance of education in this. From my perspective, the greatest and most significant impact which higher levels of participation in post-school education have provided to women is choice and opportunity.
At a school graduation ceremony last year, I made the observation to the young women who were graduating that “their” world was one of almost limitless choice and opportunity. On walking out of the school doors, they could:
• Choose a career in health, law, business, education, engineering, aeronautics, the arts, politics;
• Choose not to pursue a ‘career’ as such, but rather to join the workforce;
• Choose to marry, choose to be single;
• Choose if and when to have children;
• Choose to travel;
• Choose to pursue fame, celebrity and/or notoriety by going on a reality TV show or simply uploading a video onto YouTube or pictures on Facebook or MySpace.
Responsibility and higher education
As truly wonderful as the choice and opportunity education provides to young women is, it is not without its “catch”. With choice, with opportunity, comes responsibility. You have to make a choice. Your life’s path is not set out nor dictated to you. The freedom to choose comes with the responsibility to choose. And it is here I would say that, unless the education which has been provided to young women, which has opened up this choice and opportunity to them, has also provided them with the reasoning and ability to make “good” choices, the choice and opportunity are at best meaningless, and at worst dangerous.
It is imperative that our young women are educated about how to make decisions and how to make choices. They need to know more than the concept of “opportunity lost” – we need to teach them to be able to make good choices, to be able to make confident and responsible choices. Education in this day and age needs to be more than the 3 Rs. It needs to be more than skill acquisition.
Young women need to be able to reason, to weigh up the pros and cons of actions. They need a framework of values in which they can exercise their choice. While compassion, decency, honesty and integrity are all seemingly old fashioned values, they are values that can and should be integrated into a sound and thorough, holistic, integrated education. It won’t surprise you to hear me say that a Catholic university, one which is dedicated to Christ and to both practising and teaching Catholic faith and values, is – or should be – the place in which this can happen. Catholic education is, at its core, concerned with a holistic education; an education of all aspects of the human person: the intellectual, the social, the physical, the human, the moral, the cultural, the spiritual and the religious. Catholic education is based on the education of a ‘whole person’, not one or two aspects. It is education in its full sense.
While a Catholic university, just like a Catholic school, cannot stop young women from making mistakes and errors in judgement, it can continue to reinforce Christian values of dignity, humility, mercy, forgiveness, self-analysis, respect, compassion, justice and love for self and others during their transition into the adult world. The Catholic university can guide, support and nurture young women – in what is almost a counter cultural way – and allow them to reach their potential, realise their humanity, and make their way in the world.
By way of conclusion, I would like to refer to this conference’s theme: the quote from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: We walk by faith not by sight. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (second edition paragraph 163-164) explains this in the following terms:
“Faith makes us taste in advance the light of the beatific vision, the goal of our journey here below. Then we shall see God ‘face to face’, ‘as he is’. Now, however, ‘we walk by faith, not by sight’, we perceive God as ‘in a mirror dimly’ and only ‘in part’.” Even though enlightened by Him in whom it believes, faith is often wed in darkness and can be put to the test. The world we live in often seems very far from the one promised us by faith. Or experiences of evil and suffering, injustice, and death, seem to contradict the Good News; they shake our faith and become a temptation against it. In today’s world, the “darkness” facing our young women, the darkness which puts ’faith’ to the test for young women is found in all of the choices and opportunity which is provided to them. Some of these include:
• scientific advances
• technological advances
• moral relativism
• materialism
• cult of the celebrity
• education focused on skills
• people (‘human resources’).
Ultimately, the increasing number of women involved in higher education is only truly positive if the education they are receiving helps them to shed light on the darkness of the world in which they live. It is the role of Catholic higher education to help young women to see and understand the good that their education can achieve in this world by making choices guided by love for themselves, for their neighbour and for God, and to avoid the “dark” temptation of exercising their choices, of utilising their opportunities, in purely ways which will not lead them into the world promised us by our Faith.