Janet Stuart the educator

Whilst neither a foundress, like Madeleine Sophie Barat, nor a pioneer missionary like Philippine Duchesne, Janet Stuart led a life in the Society that was marked by years of total dedication to education in its widest sense. From her teenage years when she helped in her fathers parish school, she was an enthusiastic and gifted teacher. I would not mind what I taught as long as I could teach someone something she once said. 

As she acquired more experience she worked tirelessly to raise the standards of teaching in Sacred Heart schools, focussing especially on supporting and challenging teachers not only in what they taught but how they taught it. She gave lectures, supervised teaching practice, helped to rewrite curricula, expanded teacher training opportunities for Catholic women in England, ensured the sisters who needed to were enabled to gain university degrees, liaised with government authorities, and took detailed interest in every aspect of administration and management in Society schools and colleges.

Under her guidance the teacher training college in Wandsworth in south west London improved from what we might call a failing college at the end of the 19th century to a highly regarded one, and the new college she established in Kensington was regarded as one of the best in the country. She gave a series of influential conferences to the communities at Maryville and Manhattanville in the United States, as well at Roehampton in London, calling for adaptation of educational methods to the needs of the times. 

Her book The Education of Catholic Girls is very dated now: and indeed even in 1910-11 some of its views, for example on maths and science teaching, and on the preparation of girls for careers and higher education, were behind the times when compared to the practice of educational pioneers of a generation earlier like Miss Buss and Miss Beale, or Sister Mary of St Philip at the Catholic training college in Liverpool.  However it did broadcast to a wider audience an insistence on a personalised education that also met high academic standards, focussed on the needs of each child and is also of interest in that it was the first book by an rscj published for the secular market, rather than on a private press for only a convent audience.

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