Our goal for Sandy Spring Friends School should not be to be like everybody else. I don't even think that our goal should be to be like everybody else, but just be better at it. As an independent school, we have the opportunity to look at the terrain, at all of the different possibilities, to assess what educational innovations work and which we should adapt (should everyone in the school have a mobile device? We're thinking hard about it), and what doesn't fit for us (varsity football team? Probably not.). Being an independent school that is able to ask and answer these questions without interference is invaluable.
We are a school guided by Quaker values, values that originated with a small group of English radicals in the 17th Century. These men and women routinely upended convention and relished being different. They felt so strongly about the rightness of the notion that there is that of God within each person and that this conviction makes untenable the use of violence that they went to jail, or worse. When I read their dairies and their letters to one another I am struck by their language. The sweetness of their testimonies seems both archaic and post-modern. They were convinced that the Truth was within each of them and could be revealed, yet at the same time they expressed a sense of uncertainty and confusion. They prayed for guidance.
Quakers answered a calling by starting schools. This spoke to a striving for equality as well as the notion that seeking Truth was hard work and required knowledge as well as wisdom. Starting a school combines a sense of responsibility, optimism and entrepreneurial spirit - characteristics that I feel remain a quintessential part of the Quaker mindset and that remain alive today. Penn Charter in Philadelphia was founded in the 1690s; it operates under the authority of a charter that was signed by William Penn. Since that time, colleges founded by Quakers include Cornell University, Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Guilford, and many others.
Fast forward several centuries to Sandy Spring as the Eisenhower years are winding down. A group of neighbors are sitting around a table; it is time to start another Friends School.
It is with that same Quaker spirit of responsibility, optimism, and innovation that we consider Sandy Spring Friends School today, now 50 years old. We do this with the challenge of living in a noisy world where we are told that our collective prosperity is dependent on ever-increasing amounts of consumption and that shopping is an act of patriotism. Still, we know that some things haven't changed. Sitting quietly seeking the Truth within remains a profoundly radical act for the same reason it has always been. We reject the idea that someone has to explain and define the Truth in order to make it clear and understandable to ordinary people, because there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Thinking independently is an act of defiance.
What defines the practice of Quakers is silence, but it is more than just silence: it is the act of listening and speaking out of the silence. It is un-intermediated revelation, yet it is not done in solitude. Quakers do not sit alone cross-legged on mountain tops. We test our inspiration, our stirrings, the still small voice we hear within us by standing in Meeting among our neighbors, friends, and peers, and we speak our minds. We slip our revealed truth into a crucible of collected minds where it is listened upon, deliberated upon, shifted and, sometimes, stored to be enlarged upon, to be deepened. Ideas play inter-dependently, as teammates supporting each other, toward a larger aim that is inevitably built on courage, spirit, and connectedness leads to completeness.
There is a considerable amount at stake when thinking about the mission and purpose of our school. We can be an ordinary school, or we can distinguish ourselves by being a well-ranked school doing what others do (just a bit better). Or, we can be something more. In a Friends community, it is incumbent for all of us to sit around the kitchen table and decide.