Quaker Education in The Atlantic Magazine
April 03, 2025
Quakers aren’t known to toot their own horns. You’ll often hear the phrase “Let your life speak” if you hang around Quakers long enough, and it roughly translates to “actions speak louder than words”, or live your values. So you don’t see a lot of media attention on Quaker education, even though Quaker schools are often highly respected and have been known to graduate students who go on to be acclaimed in their fields or society in general, not to mention being kind and thoughtful humans.
But this week, The Atlantic posted an article titled “Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time” that connects decades of Quaker practices in raising and educating children with some of the most recent parenting research findings. Not a surprise to us here at Cambridge Friends School, but it’s a great read and does a lovely job of connecting the dots on some of the subtle ways that we approach teaching and learning, and they make all the difference.