In the quest for truth, training our minds is one way to improve our understanding of God’s world. The home is the primary source of education. Quaker parents take serious responsibility for their roles as parents. Experience, well evaluated, is perhaps the highest form of learning.
We hope schools will be environments of respect, receptivity, and excitement. Friends’ schools encourage acceptance of individual differences within a caring community, the development of creativity, and spiritual as well as mental growth. The curriculum should be true to specific facts as well as to the whole of life and should be presented to students with the wonder, energy, awe, and love that nourish the life of the spirit.
Many Friends are engaged in working to improve public education. We have a concern that schools provide an opportunity for young people to learn to care for each other and to practice the principles of cooperation. We want to talk about teaching methods and content with legislators, school boards, administrators, and teachers.
The aim of learning, whether it be in a school or at home, is to make whatever testimonies we live by more of a need than a choice.... So that it becomes unthinkable not to serve others. So that it becomes unthinkable not to consider all humans part of the same family. So that a Schweitzerian “reverence for life” becomes a need rather than a self-conscious choice. Then, perhaps, some of our testimonies may have more meaning.
– Richard L. Eldridge, 1984