The answer
Anyone can enter the monastic life, whether educated or not. It depends on renouncing the world, dedicating oneself to worship and prayer, training in the life of holiness and purity of heart, along with losing one's life in terms of this world... But what is important, as far as you are concerned, is how you pray, and how you spend your time.
Perhaps you don't have the capacity yet for constant prayer and deep prayers of the heart, that occupy your whole time.
The Agpeya prayer book, along with the prayers of the saints, can help you to fill your time with prayer. But how can you
learn the Psalms and the prayers of the prayer book without knowing how to read or write?
The only thing you could do would be to get someone to teach you all these psalms and prayers, so that you could memorise them, just as the teachers of the Church hymns are responsible to pass them on to others. But this would have to be before joining a monastic order.
We can also say the same about the hymns of praise which the nuns recite in church after the midnight prayer. This requires a reading and writing knowledge of the Coptic language, not only Arabic.
A certain amount of time in the monastic life is spent in reading the Bible and spiritual books, the lives of the saints and other useful books.
Reading is not only something to occupy your time, but is so that you can gain from the spiritual thoughts, feelings, meditations and love for goodness which certain writings can inspire in the heart.
You will miss out on all this if you do not know how to read and write, and I don't just mean that you will lose something by not being familiar with them as knowledge, but you will not be able to enjoy the benefits of their effect on your spiritual life.
Your not knowing how to read or write might perhaps create within you inferiority complex, especially if you compare yourself to the other nuns who do have this spiritual potential.
But does all this mean that you should abandon the idea of entering the religious life for these reasons, or could we look for a remedy? The answer might be for you to put an end to your illiteracy, as now there are schools established for this purpose.
Or the remedy might be for you to learn the Psalms and prayers and parts of the Agpeya, plus the tunes of the Psalmody, and begin memorising them straightaway, just as the specialist teachers in the Church memorise them.
You can also train yourself to pray from the heart, or to pray continuously or repeat short prayers or special prayers, so that you will not lose the essential element of prayer, which is the basis of the monastic life.
Try to compensate for your inability to read, by some other means, such as by endeavouring to apply yourself to the element of prayer by memorising and training yourself to do it.
If a person is serious about his spiritual life, and in his orientation towards the religious life, even if he is illiterate, he can gain a great deal from the readings in the Church which are taken from the Books of the Bible and the Synaxarium (the history of saints celebrated by the Coptic
Church), along with listening to what his fellows in the monastic order recite.
The Bible can be recorded on cassette tapes to be listened to. Although this is rather a hard way to learn, it leads to good results, in that it is better than being deprived for ever of reading the Bible, or listening to it whenever one wants.
All this applies if one is steadfast about joining this order and his purpose is wholly dedicated to that. The life of one seeking to join monasticism needs to be holy in God's eyes, pleasing to the other monks or nuns in the monastery and meet the approval of the director in charge.
The monastic life is not just learning and knowledge. There are those who make up for a lack of knowledge, with purity of the heart, just as some of the saints did.
If, however, there is ignorance of the spiritual life, in addition to an inability to read and to write, then it would be better to abandon the idea of embarking on monasticism.
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Thrice-Blessed Pope Shenouda III of Blessed Memory