What Could An Outstanding Education Look Like?

It is the mission of Cambridge Friends School to provide an outstanding education. Guided by Quaker principles, we engage students in meaningful learning with a caring community strongly committed social justice. We expect all students to develop their intellectual, physical, creative, and spiritual potential and, through the example of their lives, to challenge oppression and to contribute to justice and understanding the world.

[From the Cambridge Friends School mission statement]

 

What would such an outstanding education actually look like? How CFS’s fifth-grade class prepared its delightful, well-researched, and highly informative contribution to the school’s annual Pride Assembly on April 17^th offers a concrete example.

 

The class’s process began, as so often happens when meaningful learning takes place, with a question…

 

Prompted by the events surrounding and leading up to what happened in 1969 at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, someone wondered aloud: What’s the difference between an uprising and a riot?

 

Those fifth graders weren’t so sure. Intrigued, however, open and curious, the class delved, probed, discussed. They researched the lives of several, notable, history-making members of the LGBTQ+ community. They asked more questions. They read. They watched videos. So, although at the Pride Assembly each classmate shared something about what each had discovered, “as a class” they proudly declared what, over time, they’d collectively come to understand about that all-important and nuanced question.

 

As often happens at CFS, where meaningful learning is often a group project yet everyone’s contribution is valued, one fifth-grader’s casual remark sparked Part Two of her class’s Pride Assembly presentation this year. When she’d mentioned she had a pride flag in her bedroom, her community paid attention.

 

Delving again, the class learned more about the multi-hued history of their classmate’s flag. At the assembly, like the individual colors comprising a rainbow flag, each classmate offered something about what they’d learned. And, at their grand finale, when each student held up a different flag, each representing a different identity of the LGBTQ+ community, what a beautiful, sneaker-wearing rainbow!