The Gift of Education

 

You may have seen a video that Friends produced for our 275th anniversary celebration, in which I shared with the videographer samples of "payment vouchers. "

We know that over 2200 of these vouchers were distributed between the late 18th C. and early-mid 19th C.  They supplied education for poor children in the Wilmington area and were sponsored by Wilmington Monthly Meeting (WMM), which founded and ran Friends School.

They were distributed by members of the School Committee-- the early version of  the Board of Trustees--to the poor parents of these children.  The parent would then bring the voucher to a school master or mistress supported by WMM.  That teacher would admit the pupil for a limited time--"one quarter" (meaning three months) was  common. Often those same children would receive subsequent payment vouchers.  Each "quarter" cost $2.50. The teachers would bring these to the School Committee treasurer, for reimbursement.  The ones above were for student John Wilson and David Hicks, for two months, signed by Thomas Garrett, one of the most important station keepers of the Underground Railroad, and a member of the School Committee.  The teacher was William S. Thomas a Black American who received almost 400 such payment vouchers over the course of about 30 years, for Black children attending separate "African" schools.

Why did WMM do this?  First, Quakers, starting with founder George Fox (below) in the 17th C., believed that all children should have at least a basic education, learning to "read, write, and cipher," (do math).  This effort by WMM was a "gift of education," and education was a pathway to two other Quaker values: equality and community.  Friends believed that all persons, regardless of race, gender, or religion, are equal before God and should be treated with respect.  They also believed that it was their task to help create a strong and self-reliant community--not simply of Quakers, but of the community as a whole.  Our local Quakers advocated education so "that there be not a beggar among us." 

Secondly, the state of Delaware did not begin public education until 1827.  Furthermore, Black children were excluded from attending public school, a ban that lasted until after the Civil war--and then was lifted only gradually, and in a miserly, grudging, and racist fashion.  This WMM support was the only source of schooling for Black children in early 19th C. Wilmington.

The last payment vouchers we have found were from the 1840s.  It does not appear that WMM was providing education for poor children thereafter, though they did provide adult literacy teaching in the mid-19th C. 

In the early 1880s, under the leadership of Isaac Johnson, a very young graduate from Haverford College, Friends' School and WMM behind it set out to become a college preparatory school.  It is shown here in the early 20th C.

Did this change mean our local Quakers had given up the goal of providing education for the community?  I suggest that we see a new method of Friends bringing education and enlightenment not only to our own school and meeting community but also to that of our neighbors.  Over many decades Friends has sponsored nationally known speakers whose talks dealt with matters reflective of Quaker values and were open to the public.  Two early examples were the social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis and the author Hamlin Garland. 

Danish-born Riis was one of the first journalists to use photography, and in 1890 he published How the Other Half Lives, a scathing expose of the extreme depths of squalor and poverty existing in New York City, often just blocks from extreme wealth.  Like much of the American public, Teddy Roosevelt was deeply impressed by Riis's work and was inspired to alleviate that suffering.  In 1906 Riis came to Wilmington to speak to the Friends community and the Wilmington public on the subject of How the Other Half Lives.  Below are some of the photos that he may have shown on the school's new stereopticon "of the highest quality," early 20th C high tech.

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A Midwesterner, Hamlin Garland (below) wrote short stories that portrayed the struggle of the subsistence farm families and the moneyed powers that often held them in thrall. 

Both Riis and Garland were among those American writers who were protesting what Twain referred to as the "Gilded Age, " the post-Civil War period during which extreme poverty  mushroomed while corruption abounded and the chasm between the wealthy and poor yawned ever wider. 

Garland also showed great understanding of  and sympathy for the American Indian culture and its decimation by white exploitation and the American government.  He spend considerable time traveling among tribal communities, and was appalled at the efforts by the American government to crush Indian ways of life by breaking up tribes into small family farms and removing children into boarding schools where their language and culture were drummed out of them. During the Annual Friends School Winter Course of Lectures, Garland gave a talk on "The Red  Pioneer" in 1905 and likely shared his respect for America's indigenous people.
        

Throughout much of the 20th C. outside speakers at Friends were most often graduation speakers with academic credentials: presidents, professors, and chaplains of prestigious universities, mostly nearby --Swarthmore, Penn, Haverford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Bryn Mawr.  Almost exclusively their renown was limited to academic circles and their addresses were to the Friends School graduates and community.  Given the challenges of two world wars and the Great Depression between them, it is not surprising that Friends School did not focus strongly on social justice and those early Quaker values of social, gender, and racial equality.

In the last third of the century, however, the civic unrest and turbulence of the 1960s and the Watergate era moved the student body and the Friends community to a greater social consciousness, and the speakers visiting Friends reflected these concerns.

In May 1974, Republican Senator Lowell Weicker of CT, who had gained fame and high regard for his principled objections to the Watergate scandals of the Nixon administration, came to Friends.  He spoke passionately about the need for a "restoration of integrity and idealism in American government."  His appearance was sponsored by the Student Fund Raising Committee, whose aim was to provide greater tuition aid for disadvantaged students and to support the Summer Program at Friends for inner-city students--an echo of Wilmington Monthly Meetings efforts 170 years earlier. Senior Sheldon Nix was the student leader of this effort.

   

Two springs later Friends School opens its doors to the community as it hosted a symposium on "the Future of the U.S. Economy," with a host of speakers on the subject.  Classes were cancelled as Senator Joseph Biden gave the keynote address, and after hearing from economists, professors, business and union leaders.  The closing talk was given by Democratic Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.  Proxmire, during his 32 years in the Senate, for renowned for his integrity, emphasizing the need for campaign finance reform, the issue of keeping defense spending under tighter control, and opposing the influence of lobbyists and big money in politics.  

Six years after Sheldon Nix graduated, his father Theo Nix tapped his wide circle of friends to arrange for the Reverend Jesse Jackson to speak at Friends School.  Addressing a very large audience of our community and the public, he exhorted the young people attending to follow the examples of those who strove for the greater racial justice during the Civil Rights era and those who opposed the Vietnam War.  He called on the students and their generation to put aside the pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence and instead to pursue excellence: "to learn, to read, to worship, and to vote, and to do these things in order to serve and to share."   

 

In October, 1990, the largest audience the school had ever housed came to listen to the documentary film-maker Ken Burns, who spoke with great eloquence about his magnum opus, The Civil War, just eight days after it had aired on PBS for the first time.  Burns had become literally an overnight sensation.  The auditorium was packed and an estimated 200 others had to be turned away.  In the smaller Meeting Room beforehand, Burns was interviewed by the New York Times, United Press International, the Wilmington News Journal--and the student reporters of the Whittier Miscellany.

  

Friends School was very fortunate in that the Delaware Historical Society had earlier that that summer asked us if we would provide a venue for Burns.  No one had ever imagined that the Civil War would have the enormous impact that it had on the nation or created the draw that it did.  For some students and faculty, his visit was one of the highlights of our time here.  

During our Bicentennial celebration, 1998-99, Friends School  offered some outstanding speakers who again drew massive crowds.  In November, 1998, the distinguished historian Doris Kearns Goodwin spent a very busy day at Friends.  She spoke three times --once to some MS and US classes; then to the entire student body and faculty; and finally, in the evening, after a well-attended dinner at the Hotel du Pont, to a broader audience of parents and visitors.  Learning the lesson of limited seating capacity from the Burns talk, this time the school provided vast array of chairs in the newly erected West gym.

 

We were fortunate to be able to secure Goodwin's services to help celebrate our 250th anniversary; in this case, it helped that WFS Board member and parent Norm Monhait was a friend of Goodwin from the days when they were both at Harvard in the 1960s.  

Speaking to us shortly after the breaking news and moral turbulence of President Bill Clinton's infidelity, Goodwin focused on the need to restore confidence and integrity to the American political system.  In doing so she previewed for us her book on Abraham Lincoln, later published as A Team of Rivals.   

She also contrasted the tainted state of American politics with the excitement generated the summer just passed in which Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa broke home run records.  Like much of America, Goodwin had been hoodwinked into thinking that baseball of the late 1990's was unstained.  Alas not so!

With charm, humor, great stories, and an awesome command of facts and perspectives, Doris Kearns Goodwin was a tremendous success.

Another highlight of the 250th anniversary celebration was the visit in September, 1999 of the great American author Toni Morrison--the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. A number of her works, such as Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye, had been and still are being read by upper school students.  Morrison spoke in the West Gym to a massive audience of students, faculty, parents, alumni, and visitors.  In explaining her approach to writing, at the intersection of history and literature, Morrison spoke of it as a process discovery, of solving mysteries of human experience.  She would get inside the mind of a character, assess all the factors weighing on this person, and imagine how that character would think and act.

After a standing ovation at the gym, Morrison spent time in our library with students and teachers afterward, gracious and charming.  

Morrison was our last 250th speaker.  The first important speaker of that celebration was one who has been here before many times: Senator Joseph Biden.  He has given two graduation speeches at Friends, in 1983 and in 2001.  On at least two other occasions he talked to the students and faculties about the national issues with which he has been a leading figure for decades.  In the spring of 1998, Senator Biden gave a talk about the challenging situation of Bosnia and American involvement in maintaining peace there. He spoke of the importance of opposing the authoritarian government of Serbia and its ethnic cleansing efforts against Bosnian Muslims--again emphasizing Quaker values of peace, tolerance, and equality.  This talk was also sponsored by the World Affairs Council.  Biden was influential in Friends School decision, in the 1990s, to welcome five refugee children from Bosnia.  Wilmington Friends School families--including Head of School Lisa Darling (shown with Biden above)--hosted these young people for years until they graduated.  

As indicated earlier, for many decades of the 20th C., graduation speakers were from the pantheon of college academia: university presidents, professors, deans, chaplain.  Within the current 21st C Friends School has often chosen as graduation public figures political figures, journalists, and writers of national renown and stature.  Among these persons were... 

• in 2002 the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist and author Anna Quindlen;

• in 2003 Viet Nam war vet and National Book Award writer Tim O'Brien, whose book The Things They Carried has often been read by students here and may be the finest piece of writing on that war;

• in 2007 Ron Suskind, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the best-selling work, A Hope in the Unseen.  

All three spoke of the values our students had received in a Quaker education and the importance of the pursuit of peace, tolerance and individualism.  All three are wonderful writers and demonstrated that capacity in what they shared with the Friends School community and the broader community.

In addition to exceptional writers and journalists, Wilmington Friends graduation speakers have often been major political figures who have shared the values that our school espouses and with which it imbues our students.  The 2009 speaker knows Friends School very well: Dan Pfeiffer, White House Director of Communication for President Obama, and a 1994 Friends School graduate.  Dan challenged the 71 graduates he addressed to "take risks and don't be afraid to fail....Most people think that no decision is better than the wrong decision. And most people would rather not try than fail.  Don't be most people."

In 2018 Lisa Blunt Rochester, the first Black and first female Congressperson from Delaware (shown here with Head of School Ken Aldridge, gave a spirited talk to a graduation class.  She too has close connections to Friends; nephew Jordan Carter graduated in 2017, and niece Hannah Carter in 2022.   In her talk she invoked two major themes--the Journey of the Hero (Shero) Seeker, articulated so well by mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. Representative Blunt Rochester also hailed the Quaker concept of SPICES, urging the students before her to keep those values well learned at Friends --simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship-- before them in the rest of their heroic journeys.

Five years later, in 2023, Senator Chris Coons, all three of whose children attended Friends--twins Jack and Mike, both 2022 graduates, and Margaret--spoke glowingly of how well-prepared students from Wilmington Friends --and other Quaker schools --are to do two of the most important tasks for responsible adults--to listen carefully and respectfully and to share their own ideas and conclusions with confidence and clarity.  Not himself a Quaker, Coons predicted that those graduates would come to value greatly --and miss--the practice of silent worship.

 

The most recent example of Friends School bringing to our Wilmington area a speaker of national renown and importance was the December, 2023 visit by Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the best-selling Just Mercy.  He spoke to a crowd of about 1500-- even larger than that of Ken Burns!-- held in the Chase Field House in south Wilmington.  He spoke about his life's work, a struggle to minimize or eliminate some ugly realities of the American system of justice:

* the astonishing imbalance in the severity of sentencing between Black and white defendants, especially as regards capital punishment;

* capital punishment itself;

* the prosecution and sentencing of juveniles as adults, despite overwhelming evidence of the unfairness of such a practice. 

Most of all, he exhorted us" to let go of the fear and anger" with which races in America so often approach each other.  He reminded us that "each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done” and embraced the Quaker principle: there is that of God in each person. 

Stevenson is the latest public figure Friends has brought to this area to educate and enlighten our own as well as the broader community, but he will not be the last.  Wilmington Monthly Meeting and Wilmington Friends School, for over 230 years, has followed the guidance of George Fox, William Penn and many other leaders of this faith: to teach us all, so that-- either materially, intellectually, or spiritually-- "there not be a beggar among us."

 

• 1777--1840s: Review of Wilmington Monthly Meeting/Friends School's effort to supply education to the poor children of the Wilmington area, "white or black," before the advent of public education in 1827.--5 minutes

• 1881-- advent of effort to refashion Friends School as a college preparatory institution, the first in the Wilmington area, under leadership of Principal Isaac Johnson- 2 minutes

• 1890s-21st C. Bring education and enlightenment to the Friends School community and the

broader community: visiting scholars, writers, social reformers

* Jacob Riis--How the Other Half Lives   Feb 1, 1906 at the Meeting; "Friends School Winter Course of lectures" New Century Club in 1895

* Hamlin Garland--noted writer of regionally-themed short stories-1-18-05

* 1970s: Sen. Lowell Weicker of the Watergate Committee--public integrity

  Sen. William Proxmire--controlling industrial-military complex

* 1980--Jesse Jackson, a connection made though the Nix family, on social justice

* 1990--Ken Burns, one week after the first airing of his Civil War documentary

* 1998--Doris Kearns Goodwin--on American history and the aftermath of the 

Bill Clinton scandals

* 1999--Toni Morrison--Nobel prize winning novelist on using historical fiction to 

more deeply understand American history and character.

* 2002--Anna Quindlen--prominent novelist and editorialist for the NYT

* 2003--Tim O'Brien--National Book Award winning novelist confronting American  involvement in Viet Nam

* QUEST speaker series--with folks such as Eboo Patel, Gish Jen, etc. 

* 2011--Eric Chivian--Nobel prize winning scientist and proponent of greater environmental activism

* 2023--Bryan Stevenson--a result of the Nathan M. Clark speaker program: enjoining the audience

to get beyond racial fear of one another and seek social and judicial justice

* And, of course, Joe Biden, on numerous occasions