Founded by Friends : the Quaker heritage of fifteen - Scarecrow Press

xii Thomas D. Hamm
into being. In some cases, that alienation has culminated in legal separation.
In others, yearly meetings have retained close control and have kept
some of these schools under close oversight. And in still others, a legal relationship
continues, but one marked at best by apathy and at worst by
considerable tension.
QUAKERS AND EDUCATION: THE AMBIVALENT LEGACY
Early Quaker attitudes toward education, as noted previously, were paradoxical.
Friends valued it as useful but also feared it as potentially dangerous.
This was especially true of higher education.
Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the writings of George
Fox (1624–1691), the preeminent figure in the early Quaker movement.
Fox argued that all true ministers of Christ, men or women, should be
called by Christ. Thus, “being bred up at Oxford and Cambridge did not
make a minister of Jesus Christ.” This view of ministry shaped Quaker attitudes
toward higher education. Before 1800, colleges and universities in
Great Britain were tied to established churches and existed in large part to
train clergy. For Friends, the link between these “hireling priests” and
higher education was so strong as to make Friends fearful of either. A college,
by its very existence, suggested that “head knowledge” could compete
with or even complement knowledge gained through obedience to
the Inward Light and the Holy Spirit. Friends were not given to compromise
on matters of faith, and they saw no room for compromise here and
little to be gained even if they had been so inclined. And in England and
the British colonies in North America, as dissenters from the legally established
churches, Friends could not enter the colleges and universities
even if they had been so inclined.
On the other hand, George Fox and other early Friends were not entirely
anti-intellectual. They valued certain kinds of education. Fox, for example,
in a 1668 statement, urged Quakers to establish schools, for both
boys and girls, that would instruct them “in whatever things were civil
and useful in creation.” By the eighteenth century, Quakerism and learning
were by no means incompatible. By 1825, for example, sixteen English
Friends had been admitted to the Royal Society, the highest honor possible
for a British scientist. As Quaker communities developed in North
America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, schools usually appeared
soon after the erection of a meetinghouse, with the same building
often housing both. Quaker education, for the most part, was not that different
from that found in other schools. Latin was useful in foreign trade,
and Greek and Hebrew could contribute to understanding the Bible.
Quakers valued learning that they saw having practical applications. As