2006-2007 Fall/Winter Directions - Friends' Central School

Finally, when I first decided to become a teacher,
I had an important conversation with Clayton
Farraday. We were walking from the Upper School to the
newly completed library, and he told me to teach the “Truth.”
I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I think now I do.
The “Truth,” as it is found in Quaker education, is a place where
inquiry, fact, humanity, and moral autonomy all meet. Our jobs
as teachers should be to make ourselves increasingly obsolete;
not just because students should be able to work on their own,
but because they ideally should be further moved along their
own individual path. In short, our job is to give students the
capacity to seek “Truth” for themselves.
After fifteen years as a teacher in Quaker schools
(Moorestown Friends, Monte Verde Friends in Costa Rica,
FEATURES – ALUMNI/AE
Brooklyn Friends, and Abington Friends), I am now back in the
School District of Philadelphia. Since last March I have played
a role in creating a brand new high school in Center City
called the Science Leadership Academy. We are a small,
progressive, magnet school that embraces technology and seeks
to incorporate the value of student driven inquiry into all of our
classes. Somehow about ten teachers who feel similarly about
education, arrived at the same place I did to form the founding
faculty. Who knows? With a little bit of luck perhaps a few
more kids in the School District of Philadelphia might get the
education they deserve. One thing I do know, when they are in
my classroom, they will be directly influenced by the faculty
that first led me to seek the truth at Friends’ Central 25 to 40
years ago.
DIRECTIONS Fall 2006 / Winter 2007 41