Quaker Teaching & Learning

“Be zealous that education shall be continued throughout life. Willingness to be used in mind as well as in body, and to be equipped in both, is a needful part of Christian character. Our service to God is incomplete without the contribution of the intellect….”

“We have natural aptitudes for the spiritual life, just as we have for walking and talking, but in each case the natural aptitudes and longings can only be fully realized with the caring support of others. That process of encouragement and nurture is the teaching-learning process, education. Our work, as educators, as parents, as humans, is to help nourish the spiritual life in ourselves and in others.”

“We are told that ‘tribulation works patience,’ that is to say, the opposition which trial gives to our desires… forms the meek and lovely temper called patience; and then, as holy scripture proceeds to inform us, patience produces experience; or in other words, a living, abiding knowledge of God, and his way of acting with the soul, and a sweet certainty that he is educating and caring for it, and preparing it for himself; none of which divine truths can be learned but through quietness of mind.”

“We know that the principles of our faith teach that we can be filled with the same life and power and spirit that produced the prophets and saints of the past, but that knowledge has not made prophets and saints out of us. God waits for us to add to that knowledge the willingness to obey the Light consistently and completely.”

“Man… may apprehend in his brain and his notions a knowledge of God and spiritual things; yet this not being the right organ for true spiritual knowledge, it cannot profit him towards salvation, but often rather hinders him. And truly, the great cause of the apostasy has been that man has sought to comprehend the things of God in and by this natural and rational principle, and to build up a religion in it, neglecting and overlooking the Light and Seed of God in the heart.”

“The attitude of the Society of Friends towards education has been determined by their belief in the Inner Light. Holding as they do that there is something of the divine in every [person], they have regarded education (in the broadest sense) as the developing of the Divine Seed, or the fanning into a flame of that Divine Spark . . . To Friends, therefore, education is an intensely religious thing; it means the training and development of the spiritual life, the liberating of the Divine that is within us.”

“Friends view education broadly as the pursuit and proclamation of Truth. The process of expanding and refining one’s understanding of God and of all creation ideally continues throughout one’s life. Development of a moral sense, an appreciation of right and wrong, along with guidance and practice in discerning Truth, is as important as other learning….”

“Everyone who believes in the existence of God attributes to him justice, mercy, and love, and that he is unchangeable in his nature, and incapable of partiality. Hence he must—and no doubt has—given to every man and woman a complete and sufficient rule of faith and practice without the aid of books or men. And [God] hath so ordered, in the course of events, that the more strictly and faithfully every man and woman lives up to the guidance and teaching of this Inward Anointing… the more instruction and help they afford one another.”

“Teachers are optimists. We would not be teachers if we did not have confidence in the future and in humankind. We trust that given the right opportunities children will grow up into responsible adults capable of making good choices and of saving the world from disaster.”

“My vocation (to use the poet’s term) is the spiritual life, the quest for God, which relies on the eye of the heart. My avocation is education, the quest for knowledge, which relies on the eye of the mind. I have seen life through both these eyes as long as I can remember – but the two images have not always coincided… I have been forced to find ways for my eyes to work together, to find a common focus for my spirit-seeking heart and my knowledge-seeking mind that embraces reality in all its amazing dimensions.”

“Religious education has always been public ministry. After Pentecost, Jesus’s disciples became apostles; those who had been his students became teachers and the early church’s foremost religious educators. Seventeenth-century Friends traveled in the ministry, sharing an emergent faith and developing practices. The nineteenth-century invention of First-day school moved formation outside the home, where family worship was experiential learning, and placed religious education in the public community of the meeting. Friends who step outside the meetingroom while the adult community is in worship in order to attend to the younger generations’ spiritual formation are public ministers.”

“The Lord God of heaven and earth is come to teach his people himself by his light, Spirit, grace, and truth, and to bring them off all the world’s teachers. God hath raised up Christ Jesus, his Prophet, whom people should hear; and saith, ‘This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him,’ and Christ saith, ‘Learn of me, I am the way, the truth, and the life; and no man comes to the Father, but by me.’”

“We seek to affirm in each child at school, each member of the meeting, each person we meet in our daily lives, the person that he or she may with God’s help grow to be. We are all the merest infants in God’s world, struggling to stand upright and walk unaided, trying in vain to articulate our halting thoughts and feelings. We stumble and fall. We give way to self-pity and shame. God hauls us to our feet again and makes sense of our childish babble, never ceasing to believe in what we may ultimately become. Do we do the same for our children and one another?”

“Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism.”