One morning in the meetinghouse last fall, a Princeton Friends School 4th grader shared some thoughts that had come to her in the gathered silence. “Time passes really quickly,” she observed. “I am a 4th grader, and someday I’ll be sitting here as an 8th grader with a younger meeting partner. But not so long ago I was a Beginning Schooler with an older partner. My mom and I have been talking about this lately, and she tells me that she misses me as a littler child when she used to read bedtime stories to me. And my dad misses carrying me around on his shoulders like he used to do. Sometimes they wish I wouldn’t keep growing up, but that’s impossible. You can never recapture the past. And in the future we won’t be able to recapture right now. So what’s important is to live each day as fully as possible, because that’s all we can do.”

These wise words capture the reason that many parents have sent their children to Princeton Friends School over the past quarter century. PFS is a setting in which students truly are encouraged to live each day as fully as possible, to be present to all the blessings of childhood in the here and now. And in being present as well to the many challenges that growing up entails, PFS students are lovingly prepared to live their lives with purpose and meaning, both now and into the future.

Toward this end, Princeton Friends School provides countless opportunities for young people to reflect on their experience, just as this particular 4th grader demonstrated. In morning circle, in the few moments of silence at the beginning of a class, in writers’ notebooks, on leadership retreats, and – most powerfully – in Settling In, Princeton Friends School’s version of meeting for worship, students step back for brief periods from the hubbub that marks their daily lives, and in doing so – somewhat paradoxically – discover the significance of what’s happening in the here and now. In simply stopping for even a brief spell from time to time, PFS students – and indeed, PFS adults as well – are encouraged to pay attention to, and in so doing to capture, what’s truly important in their lives.

In order to make possible this kind of education, Princeton Friends School itself must engage regularly in a process of reflection and renewal. This, I believe, is the heart of our practice in a Friends school. To be truly present to the Quaker call for continuing revelation, we must be willing to step back from our work, assess what is working and what is not, and together as a community envision and carry out mutually agreed-upon next steps in our institutional growth. We must recognize that change will come to our community just as inevitably as it will to every 4th grader, or 8th grader, or adult among us, and we must embrace the transformational possibilities that lie ahead. We are, and will forever be, a work in progress.

Jane Fremon
April 2015