For the past fourteen years I have been involved in a project to make the intellectual side of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition available to the nuns of that tradition. We have founded Dolma Ling Nunnery and Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, a non-sectarian study facility for women, and have also taken on the support of Shugsep Nunnery in India, a nunnery of the Nyingma tradition from which the first class of nuns recently graduated with the degree of Lopon. Based on this long immersion in monastic culture, my paper looks at issues such as the role and function of education in Tibetan monasticism, differences between monastic and secular educational models, and cultural factors that impact upon efforts to effect change.