Several students using Nazi symbols have brought Sidwell Friends School in Washington into the news. I was once a parent there
Sam Smith, 2001 - Not all Quaker schools are the same. I went to one under the watchful eye of the Germantown Friends Meeting in Philadelphia. These were not folks to trifle with. After all, in 1688, just six years after arriving in the New World, they issued the first formal protest against slavery in US. They have been telling people what they thought ever since. And we learned it at weekly meetings.
So I wasn't fully prepared for Washington's Sidwell Friends, which was started as a propriety venture by a Quaker and which by the time I became a parent was struggling to maintain Quaker values at ground zero of the military-industrial complex. Even other Quakers looked somewhat skeptically at Sidwell. It was, a Baltimore Friend said, a place where Episcopalians teach Jews how to act like Quakers. Some of us thought that having an evening on the topic might help. It turned out to be quite moving as two teachers, two parents and two students described what Quakerism at Sidwell meant to them. I was feeling pretty good about the project until the first question came - from a suit in the back of the room. "When," he asked, "did Sidwell decide to take this new direction?"
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