1920 moved to Poughkeepsie as the present Oakwood Friends School.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York Yearly Meeting Friends helped found several other schools: the New York City public schools in the early 1800s, Brooklyn Friends School (1867), Friends Academy in Locust Valley (1877), the Westbury Friends School (1957), and Friends World College (1965). Some of them continue under the care of Friends.

DIVISIONS IN THE SOCIETY

American Friends faced a new set of issues in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The United States during this period became a nation, and the spread of liberalism and democracy increasingly challenged authoritarian regimes. Methodism had spread across England and the United States; it brought religious enthusiasm and disciplined living to many people and stirred up many Friends' groups.

By 1825 many Friends' meetings seemed to share the spiritual inertia that had characterized the English churches when George Fox began to preach. Rather than encouraging vital spiritual experience, Quakerism had become largely a religion of habit and form that held to a glorious past without its substance. Behind this complacency, however, were tensions; first, between historical Christian beliefs and the assertion of the primacy of the Inward Light of Christ, with its degree of freedom from some commonly-held traditions of historical Christianity; second, the elders' enforcement in some meetings of rules that others saw as intrusive; third, social-class and urban-rural differences of thought and behavior. In some meetings Friends bore all these tensions, as generally orthodox-Christian, elder-supporting, richer, urban Friends and Inward-Light-oriented, elder-questioning, less-well-off, rural ones acrimoniously and resentfully opposed each other. As Friends confronted the world less and concentrated more on their beliefs, these tensions grew and separated Friends from Friends in several bitter divisions over the years. Some opposed these separations and continued communication between otherwise estranged Friends.

The first of these separations arose around the testimony of Elias Hicks of Long Island. He taught, very persuasively, that the Indwelling Christ is the heart and center of Quakerism. This he believed to be original Quaker teaching as well as expressive of his own experience. Others, influenced partly by several visiting British Friends, were concerned that the teaching of Hicks left out what they considered essentials of historic Quaker faith, especially its relation to the historic Jesus and the Bible. Conflict broke into the open in the early 1820s and caused the separation of five yearly meetings into two groups: the "Hicksites," who emphasized the Christ Within; and the "Orthodox," who emphasized the historical Christ Jesus. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was the first to divide (1827), followed by New York, Ohio, Indi