Missionary nun who innovated school education in India dies

By Jose Kavi

New Delhi, June 25, 2023: An Irish Catholic nun, who revolutionized school education in India with her innovative methods, died June 24 in Kolkata.

Sister Cyril Mooney died at Loreto House in the eastern Indian city at the age of 86.

Sister Mooney came to India on October 10, 1956, a year after becoming a member of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Loreto congregation.

Sister Moony “was a great soul. She was a well-known educationalist all over the world and was very closely associated with most of the priests and religious showing her care, concern, love, assuring them of her Prayer,” says a message from Father Dominic Gomes, vicar general of the archdiocese of Calcutta. “We shall miss her,” he added.

The funeral Mass, Father Gomes says, will be at 3 pm on June 27 at St Thomas Church, Middleton Row, presided over by Archbishop Thomas D’Souza of Calcutta.

Jesuit Father P J Joseph, who had worked with Sister Mooney for a month 30 years ago, found her “truly amazing and inspiring.” Writing on his Facebook page, the Jesuit said he heard for the first time, her message for the school and school children each one teach one.

“There I witnessed the privileged children teaching the underprivileged. She told me many times that wasn’t easy to begin with. But her vision and administrative acumen made it possible. My humble tribute to such a teacher par excellence. May God grant her eternal peace,” he added.

Mini Joseph, a teacher who has worked with Sister Mooney, says the nun was an institution. “She was crystal clear in her approach towards holistic education of girls, to such an extent that she included a sense of community service among the girl students of Loreto Sealdah, where she was principal,” Joseph told Matters India.

She recalled senior traveling 20 km every fortnight to teach poor students subjects such as English, Bengali, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, and Value Education.

These “barefoot teachers” would prepare charts, activity cards and help educate “thousands of young minds who would have otherwise not had any education at all,” Joseph said.

Sister worked more than 12 hours a day on her projects even after age 60 and “touched hearts regardless of religion, caste, community, and gender. Through her work, she taught me what leadership truly is. She always led from the front and this is why, it was easy to follow her advice. She was and will remain a model of grace, firmness, efficiency and inner power. A candle not to blown off,” she added.

Sister Mooney was the principal of Loreto Day School where she introduced a curriculum that included “work for justice” and was awarded the 1994 Noma Prize by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The US$15,000 prize, established in 1980 with the help of the late Japanese publisher Shoichi Nom, recognizes innovative programs.

In 2007, she won the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India. Six years later, she was given the Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award.

Sister Mooney was born July 21, 1936, in Ireland but she lived and worked in India for 67 years where she emerged as a nationwide leader in bringing quality education to urban and rural poor children.

The nun, who believed that work for justice is not cosmetic, but integral, involved the school community in programs such as the Rainbow Program and rural child-to-child and barefoot teaching.

Sister Mooney’s school housed, fed, and educated nearly 250 street children, besides welcoming another 100 for special classes during the school day.

These children whom she called “Rainbows,” came with little or no school experience or literacy. The nun integrated them into mainstream classrooms. This was done in the children’s mother tongues – Bengali or Hindi- but she integrated many Rainbow students into the English medium Loreto Day School itself.

The model was successfully implemented at dozens of other schools across India.

Another innovation was the Barefoot Teachers Training Program that provided teacher training to young people from slums and villages near Kolkata who lacked the basic requirements for admission in teachers’ colleges.

Sister Cyril and her team trained more than 7,000 teachers, who in turn brought primary education to over 350,000 village children with no access to education.

The name “Barefoot Teachers” comes from the philosophy that one doesn’t need shoes to walk, but only feet. The teachers in the program were given practical teaching skills without the unnecessary and irrelevant addition of teaching theory.

The Shikshalaya Prakalpa (school project), an expanded urban arm of the Barefoot Teachers Training Program, coordinated 470 teaching centers throughout Kolkata. The teachers at these centers received similar Barefoot Teaching training at the Loreto School in Sealdah before returning to the slums to teach children who had no previous access to education.

Another program was Hidden Domestic Child Labour Outreach, an arm of the Loreto Day School, combatted the crisis of young children being put to work for their families or other slum employers rather than being sent to school.

Loreto students, under the guidance of Sister Mooney, sought out such children and employers, and through various methods tried to reduce the trend.

Every Thursday, Loreto students in grade five and above travelled to villages outside of Kolkata to teach schoolchildren. The program provided more intimate learning experiences while simultaneously introducing struggles of rural education to the regular Loreto students. These efforts reached more than 3,500 students a week.

The Brick Field School Project was started in 2008 to bring the school to the migrant children in the Brick kilns of West Bengal with an open-air trunk school. These children travelled with their families for some seven months to work in the brick fields. When they returned to their village in Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh they failed to cope up with their studies and dropped out of school. The brick field school helped them continue with their basic education.

The nuns encouraged her students to teach in villages and slums at the age of 10.

The nun used to say that “work for justice” is an integral part of the curriculum that should be done at a time convenient to the client. The program made children aware of others´ needs and helped them understand they did something necessary for society.