MOTHER TERESA A TEACHER IN THE GLOBAL CL ASSROOM Edmund Burke has aptly said, “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” Or as Gilbert West highlights, “Example is a lesson that all men can read.” Each year India celebrates Teachers’ Day on 5 September, the birth day of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India’s second President and an erudite philosopher and educationist. Teachers’ Day 2016 saw another great teacher on India’s, nay, on the world’s educational horizon, St. Teresa of Kolkata, who taught in the ‘global classroom’ through her exemplary life. She continues to do so, through her Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, who, spread across 133 countries, are imparting practical lessons in loving service to the countless victims of neglect and indifference.
Darjeeling she received from God the “Inspiration” or special message involving a “call within a call”. Till then she had been principal of St. Mary’s School at Entally, Kolkata, and had taught History and Geography in that school run by the Loreto Sisters. Her “call within call”, demanded her to leave the Loreto Congregation and to dedicate herself to serve the “poorest of the poor”. After patient waiting and requests she received official permission through Archbishop Ferdinand Perrier of Kolkata in January 1948 to leave her first religious “call”. Dressed in white, blue-bordered sari she left the portals of her beloved Loreto Convent on 17 August 1948 to enter the world of the poor.
After a short medical course in the Holy Mother Teresa was a member of the Lo- Family Convent Hospital in Patna, Mother Tereto Sisters from 25 May 1931. On 10 Septem- resa returned to Calcutta and found temporary ber 1946, on her train journey from Kolkata to lodging with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On
6 / Dimapur Links: Sept. - Oct. 2016
