Young gardeners at Sibford.
A Quaker-educated perspective on the world
Judy Kirby introduces the Quaker schools special edition and explains why she commissioned it
We can all remember this… ‘we trudge to school, and we complain that it’s too early, or too dark, or too wet, or quite possibly all three’. We’ve slept till the last minute ‘and not many of us bother with the luxury of the morning news’. Oblivious then, to the wider world. This is a pupil at Sibford Quaker School describing one of his days. But it is a Friday and ‘everyone gathers to attend the last obstacle that lies between them and the weekend, the Friday Meeting’. And it is here that the awfulness of the world intrudes, as the gathered school Meeting hears recordings from eyewitnesses of the Haitian earthquake. Our scholar responds – ‘the weary travellers of the world start to wake’. For a Friend editor, Quaker schools are up there with ‘Are Quakers Christian?’ as a bone of contention. So it is with some trepidation we present this special Schools’ issue, in which we have invited seven Friends schools in Britain to write their own mini versions of the magazine. They were each given the same briefing – produce three pages of comment, opinion, feature material and reviews. We thought the Eye page a bit too idiosyncratic for kids to reproduce, but that could have been a mistake!
