Academics and Beyond
A Challenging and Nurturing Education for the Whole Child
Children learn differently in early childhood through middle school than high school students or adults do. They have unique needs and characteristics. By focusing only on children through 8th grade, Cambridge Friends ensures that everything we do – from the types of teachers we hire to the curriculum we teach – is designed to bring about the most academic and personal growth from our students.
Children, essentially, need the right combination of two factors:
- to be challenged to achieve and meet high standards,
- and to be supported in that work by a caring community and nurturing surroundings.
When children are genuinely challenged and encouraged to follow their curiosity in an environment rich in academic opportunities – like at Cambridge Friends School – they develop a learning mindset and a strong academic foundation for the long term. By encouraging the early development of each child’s individual character and academic aptitude, they are shaped into learners who are well prepared for the next step into excellent high schools and beyond. This is important and challenging work, and we ask a lot of our students.
So we challenge our students, but do so only within a genuinely warm, nurturing, and supportive environment. This creates the conditions in which each student will grow the most, both as students and as people. When a proper balance of high expectations and nurturing support is created, truly exceptional growth occurs.
A Foundation of Quaker Values
The foundational elements of academic challenge and nurturing environment are essential features of a good education, but when combined with our core Quaker values, you find the value of a Cambridge Friends School education.
Quaker schools emphasize critical thinking skills, in which each person’s unique insights contribute to a collective learning. Students who graduate from a Quaker school walk away with both a solid educational foundation and a strong sense of self. They are better prepared to deal with adversity and they understand the need to promote harmony in their quest for knowledge. Students are challenged to develop inner resources for discipline and achievement. Each student’s gifts and talents are honored.
At Cambridge Friends, the Quaker values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equity, and stewardship combine with a drive for social justice, nonviolent conflict resolution, and tolerance and respect for all people. These are part of every school day. There is no direct religious instruction at the school – it is a place of lived values – and those values introduce complexity into our academics and connect us to our essential humanity, making for a rich and deep education for life.
Tuesday Meeting for Worship
Every Tuesday morning, the school gathers for Meeting for Worship, a time when the entire school settles into silence. Faculty, staff, and students set aside their work, and phones are turned off.
A quiet descends and there is room for peace and reflection. Most weeks, the meetings are held in each classroom, but once a month, there is an all-school meeting where the entire school gathers and sits together in the gym or courtyard.
A Well-Rounded Education
The education at Cambridge Friends School goes beyond academics with supporting education across many other areas:
- Affinity groups that provide space to recognize and affirm each child’s lived experience
- Arts that reach from poetry to drama to painting to string ensemble
- Physical education that teaches the body through movement on the playground or play garden, in PE class, and interscholastic sports teams
- Values-based learning connected to our Quaker values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equity, and stewardship that connects with students’ academic learning
- Social and emotional learning and lessons that help students become thoughtful, emotionally intelligent people
And this learning happens in community – a caring community that includes teachers, peers, and parents working together.
Affinity Groups
In keeping with our mission, we support affinity groups that aim to affirm, protect, and nurture the racial and cultural identities of all of our students. Our mission reminds us that “As part of our commitment to social justice, we are engaged in building an anti-racist community, and we actively seek students and staff from a diverse range of family structures and racial, cultural, socioeconomic, and religious backgrounds. Our community tries to go beyond mere tolerance to more deeply address issues of bias and privilege.”
Students of color from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade regularly get together with other students and adults with whom they share experiences based on their racial identity and cultural background. Faculty and staff of color facilitate these groups. While the primary purpose of race-based affinity groups at CFS is to support the identities of students of color, meeting in groups also allows for white students and allies to meet separately so that they may also engage in this work.
Establishing race-based affinity groups acknowledges that racism exists in various forms in the larger society to which our school belongs. Race-based affinity groups serve to affirm, protect, and nurture the cultural and racial identities of students of color while our school continues to engage in uncovering and opposing racism in our school community. We believe that affinity groups benefit everyone.
We chose CFS because we wanted a school that created the space for our child to be himself while developing a love of learning. It was important to us that the school we chose for our child supported him as he was and did not force him into some idealized notion of a child/student. 
Current 8th grade Parent
Values are at the center of CFS — the basic human values of justice and peace. These are not only sincerely held, they animate all of school life… and they inform the curriculum with a viewpoint centered on ethics, truth, compassion and social responsibility.
Current Parent
And the teachers… every one has been remarkable: true educators animated by a love for what they are doing.
Current Parent
CFS nurtures each child, finding their light and letting it shine. After 10 years at CFS our student is a confident, empathetic, engaged learner with the foundations to understand and advocate for justice and equity, not only for himself but also for those around him in his community.
Current 8th grade parent
We've really enjoyed the community of families at CFS and everyone's openness and kindness. Our kids have thrived in their classrooms, and have found their own path despite having very different personalities.
Current Kindergarten and 2nd grade Parent
The teachers and staff have been wonderful partners in our children's education, and really go above and beyond to ensure a positive learning environment for the students.
Current parent of a Kindergartener and 2nd Grader
