What is the Value of a Friends School Education?
@MollyHaley Photography
by Sara Primo and Brooke Burkett
Friends School of Portland is the only Quaker school in Maine and in Northern New England. As a small, young school, connecting with graduates from other Friends schools lends to fruitful conversations and illuminates our program in a way that can be otherwise difficult to notice.
Recently, we held two different but connected discussions around Quaker education. While visiting Philadelphia for the Annual Fall Quaker School Heads Gathering, Sara Primo, Head of Friends School of Portland, led a discussion at Crosslands Retirement Community, hosted by their Quaker Meeting, on the topic of Friends Education. A group of about twenty-five people gathered to hear a brief presentation about Friends School and consider the queries: “How has your life been touched by Quaker education? What are the threads that connect Friends Schools? What looks different after a Friends education?”
In attendance were alum parents from Wilmington Friends and Westtown, former educators at Moses Brown School and George School, and a current Friends Central board member. Highlights of the conversation included:
“Each student gets the message that they matter.”
“Quaker education is about teaching wholeness.”
“Young people learn the value of silence, and silence changes their lives.”
“A Friends education teaches reflection and kindness.”
Back at school, we gathered a small group of current Friends School of Portland parents who attended another Quaker school to chat over coffee with similar queries. Our conversation began by thinking about the value of a Friends School education, and it weaved in the ways that Friends School of Portland is the same and different. And unexpectedly, or rather expectedly, we ended with an impromptu moment of silence. Here are a few highlights and a window into the coffee:
“I went to a Quaker school in Philadelphia. Being in the Philly area, there is a Quaker culture. The meeting is a strong entity with many members attending the school meeting regularly. There is a presence of elders in the community.”
“I don’t think that the acronym SPICES was coined yet. But I still definitely got all the values!”
“I was thinking about how it can be hard to grow and still be a small community. Sandy Spring Friends School has done a good job at this. Like here, you can really feel immediately how tied to the values the school and even camp are too.”
“There’s such a breadth of Quaker schools. There are a lot of differences between them, but there is also a kinship.”
“I attended a Quaker school, and I’m not a religious person. But I was shocked when the thing that I missed most after graduation was meeting for worship. Being able to sit with others in silence is extraordinary. I was more keenly aware of this when my own child, who has just recently graduated from FSP, shared, “It’s like no one knows how to sit in silence with their own thoughts and without a cell phone.”
“I was a Quaker school lifer from preschool through 12th grade. That being said, my experience was different than that of my kids. I really notice how my children approach understanding ideas different than their own with an openness. And how they talk through conflict.”
“Something that I didn’t realize as a student, but as an adult who has worked at Friends schools, is how much Quaker governance impacts the culture.”
“At a Friends School, each person gets seen, cared for, and noticed in all its prisms and permeations. It’s one of the most valuable things about Quaker education that I can see.”