When the President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama chose to send their daughters to Sidwell Friends School (Washington, DC), they touched off a flurry of interest in Quaker education.
Founded by religious dissenter George Fox in 1652, the Quakers (members of The Religious Society of Friends) have long advocated for peace and social justice across race and culture, religion, and gender. Actively engaged in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements of the 17th–20th centuries, the Quakers’ involvement in education is another extension of their commitment to seeing “the light within each person.”
Many educators and authors who are committed to social justice have chosen a Quaker education for their children, from Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, whose book about the Iraqis’ perspective of the Iraq war earned him international acclaim, to MIT Associate Professor Helen Elaine Lee, a novelist and advocate for prison reform. Both send their children to the Cambridge Friends School (Massachusetts).
For Shadid, “If there was one lesson I learned from reporting in Iraq, it was that differences in culture, traditions and even history paled before our commonly held values. Like Americans, the people I interviewed there want their children to eat well, to be safe, to be educated and to live in a just world… I chose a Quaker school for my daughter because I wanted her to understand that there are principles that join us as citizens of the world, and those principles — justice, tolerance, and equality — matter.”
Parent Helen Elaine Lee, associate professor of writing and humanistic studies at M.I.T. and a member of PEN New England’s Freedom to Write Committee, talks about her son, now in his fifth year of a Quaker education.
“I come from a long line of people who worked to transcend and demolish barriers to full participation in American society. My great grandfather was born a slave and became a university president. As a writer and teacher, I create narratives of African-American experience which criticize and resist social injustice, and celebrate culture and identity.
"For the last seven years I have been writing about, and working with, prisoners because the crisis of incarceration is one of the most pressing issues of social justice before our society.” For Lee, choosing a Quaker education for her son was vital, because it “embeds social criticism in its curriculum and instills engagement, activism, and leadership in its students.”