Friends had already been concerned and involved in education. They extended this concern to those whom society excluded from schooling--females, blacks, and Indians despite--opposition from the non-Quaker community and from the Indians themselves. As early as 1779, the New York Yearly Meeting recommended that the quarterly and monthly meetings establish schools for Friends' children. In 1791, several were in operation, and in that same year the yearly meeting called on preparative meetings to establish schools. Friends Seminary in New York City opened in 1786. The Nine Partners Boarding School, founded in 1796 as the yearly meeting school, preceded the Friends Academy at Union Springs, opened in 1858, which in 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), Friends World College (1965), and the Mary McDowell Center (1983), in Brooklyn. 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.