Education
In 1815, Van de Velde began attending the famous Archiepiscopal Seminary at Mechlin. Two years later, he was one of the students selected by Father Charles Nerinckx, a missionary headed to the Americas on May 16, 1817. The initial plan was for Van de Velde to complete his theological studies in a seminary in Bardstown, Kentucky. However, while crossing the Atlantic in the brig Mars, Van de Velde fell during a storm and "burst a blood vessel," which caused such loss of blood that, upon arrival in America, he was left too weak to make the overland journey to Kentucky. Instead, he retired to St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore to recuperate. The storm had been so violent that the ship was adrift for three days without sails or a helm until repairs could be made. In addition, Van de Velde suffered from seasickness for a full month of the crossing.
Father Nerinckx advised Van de Velde to enter Georgetown College and the novitiate of the Society of Jesus rather than the seminary at Bardstown. After he completed his two-year Jesuit novitiate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Van de Velde continued his academic and theological studies for eight more years.
Read more about this topic: James Oliver Van De Velde
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... education fails in so far as it does not stir in students a sharp awareness of their obligations to society and furnish at least a few guideposts pointing toward the implementation of these obligations.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)