The Obama Daughters and 'Quaker' Schools
As Travis points out, Sasha and Malia Obama will attend Sidwell Friends School once the new First Family arrives in D.C. in a couple of months. Travis asks, “I’m wondering what my Quaker friends would think of this… Perhaps the Quaker peace testimony will wear off onto the president.”
(Travis: to be clear, I should point out that the girls didn’t pick, as the title of your post states… I’m sure Michelle held, um, veto power over any preference they might have expressed.)
But: As one of your Quaker friends, I have mixed feelings about this. I wasn’t particularly surprised that the Obamas chose Sidwell. After all, it was where Chelsea Clinton went, and the President-Elect certainly seems to want to use the best resources of the Clinton Administration in his tenure. I’m sure that it will be a very good experience for Sasha and Malia. I have no doubt that Sidwell is an excellent college prep school, much like Baltimore Friends, my alma mater.
I’m actually surprised at myself, but I’m not going to say that the girls should be going to a DC public school. Yes, Michelle Obama is a product of the Chicago Public Schools, the Obamas express support for public education, yada yada yada. I’m not a parent, and I am a product of private primary and secondary education, so it’s not my place to advocate a choice that I am not able to make myself. If I did have my own kids, I can’t be sure that I would opt in favor of public education for them.
My feeling is, however, that nobody should be making a big deal out of the Obama daughters attending Sidwell because it’s a Quaker school. If it’s anything like Balto Friends, it isn’t really very much of a Quaker school.
First off, there’s the testimony of simplicity: one certainly pays the price for this excellent college prep education. The San Francisco Chronicle this morning reported a tuition figure something on the order of $28,000 per annum for the younger Obama daughter, and $29,000 for the elder (sorry, can’t remember which girl is which). I think the tuition for one full-freight year at Sidwell would have more than paid for my 3 years at ESR. Now, I don’t know how many of Sidwell’s students get financial aid, and how many of those kids are from communities of color, and I’m sure they have a deep and abiding commitment to diversity, but gee whiz, that’s a lot of money! I can’t help but wonder about what bearing the testimony of equality has there, if any.
Beyond this, there’s something a little more difficult to articulate, and only those who really like me are going to want to read much more of this, but… since the time that I was a self-styled radical Quaker adolescent (think: pretentious tiresome scraggly-bearded little git) at Balto Friends, I have had an axe to grind with the way that Quaker education is often carried out at the primary and secondary levels.
Quaker education began in the era of Quietism, when Friends were turning inward and constructing a hedge around their communities. The original purpose of Baltimore Friends and probably also Sidwell (but I’m not sure when Sidwell was established) was to “provide a guarded education” for Quaker children. This was fine for a while, until Quakers stopped having large families and the schools needed to admit other children in order to ensure their survival.
I suppose this is one of the dilemmas of any kind of sectarian education—maybe the Church of the Brethren and other Anabaptists have encountered this as well. What to do when your sect/denomination becomes small enough that it can no longer sustain all of your institutions? You either start closing them, or you turn outward and welcome in others—hopefully those reasonably sympathetic to the things you hold dear. Many communities of Conservative Friends, like the one in which Wil Cooper grew up in eastern Ohio, made the former choice. (Cooper was the founding dean of ESR, recently deceased. Conservative Friends, at least in his youth, were by and large plain folks with a few commonalities with some of the more traditional sectarian Anabaptist groups.)
But many of the older schools on the prosperous East Coast, like Sidwell and Baltimore Friends, took the other route. Nothing wrong with this, necessarily, especially if the alternative is closing the school. But the result is an inevitable change in the institution’s manner of doing things, such that the guiding principles of Quaker faith are generally replaced with something that is more often articulated as Quaker values.
As a pretentious tiresome scraggly-bearded Quaker adolescent, I wouldn’t have articulated what I felt was wrong with my school in this way, but it was obvious to me that being with the kids at school was different from being with the kids at my meeting (and, to make it even more complicated, being with the kids at my meeting who went to my school was different when we were at school than when we were at meeting). Especially in my high school experience, the culture of Baltimore Friends was much more beholden to the default values of the majority culture than it was to Quaker faith or even to Quaker values: competitiveness and success, especially WRT athletics and college admissions, were at the end of the day more important than the inherent worth of each individual, or “that of God in each person” (which is the closest that schools like Balto Friends get to speaking theologically these days).
Now, again, none of this may apply to Sidwell Friends School. I’m sure that Sidwell is a darn sight better at deflecting or mitigating some of the deleterious influences of our dominant culture than some other private college prep schools the Obamas could have chosen. It certainly makes no difference at all whether or not Sidwell Friends measures up to my specifications for a “true” Quaker school (such a beast probably doesn’t exist, though I think Olney Friends might come closest). I don’t really think most Sidwell parents, including the Obamas, have “faith of the Religious Society of Friends” first on their list when they choose the school.
But nonetheless: Paul Lacey, emeritus professor at Earlham College and well-respected Quaker educator, once wrote a pamphlet called Education and the Inward Teacher (Pendle Hill #278) in which he articulated an “inward-centered” approach to Quaker education, an alternative both to content-centered and student-centered approaches that, while using the best of both of those, should fundamentally “operate from the conviction that there is always one other in the classroom—the Inward Teacher, who waits to be found in every human being.” This approach is what, at the remove of twenty-five years, I find lacking in my experience as a student at a Friends School. I pray that Sasha and Malia Obama might not find the same lack.
