As I write this letter to you, Lower School children are sledding on the Headwaters Discovery Playground, feeling the cold winter air on their cheeks, the thrill of acceleration as they go down the hill, and the silence that catches up to them as they stop abruptly at the bottom. Warm in their snow clothes, they take a moment to watch their breath in front of them before climbing back up the hill.
Encouraging this outdoor play is one of many means to ensuring that our students are immersed in a breadth of experience, a hallmark of the AFS vision for education. We believe in education that speaks to every dimension of who our children are as human beings. What does this mean for our students?
This means developing the intellect in habits of mind, in the languages of knowing that comprise the academic disciplines and in connecting children to a wide literature of human thought in the humanities and sciences. A powerful academic program is at the heart of our school, kindling the imagination and love of learning while preparing students well for advanced study in college and beyond.
It means nurturing introspection and giving generous time for ideas to unfold, for coming to know the contours of one’s inner life.
It means making the school day rich in social connection, of engaging in the give and take of multiple perspectives, of seeing the conflicts of everyday life in community as jumping off points to deepen understanding and sharpen social intelligence.
It means using our beautiful campus to ensure a grounded sense of the natural world. Closely observing the seasons and growing cycles, building forts, creek walks, clear nights outside with a telescope and other experiences in the outdoors that ground childhood in a digital age.
It means using one’s hands to make and shape things, feeling the sensation and discovering the possibilities of charcoal on paper for over-sized self-portraits in the Upper School, or in fashioning fantastic puppets in the Middle School art room from disparate materials.
It means making music, finding that intimate connection between breath and sound, learning to hear oneself within the harmony, feeling the “wow” of crescendo that you can only make in a 50-person orchestra. It means learning to move through space in a beautifully choreographed song in an Upper School musical.
It means getting out into the outside world to connect this intimate community with a larger landscape of people, architecture, neighborhoods and institutions in dozens of trips and programs throughout the year. These experiences range from working with animals in the Middle School service program to Upper School students leading an all-day workshop at Cheltenham High School in exercises to explore diversity and identity. With our new Center for Experiential Learning, we’re envisioning students in a yearlong mentorship with professionals and planning new opportunities in international travel and exchange.
And it means the wide experience of athletics, pushing the limits of one’s physicality, learning to compete with both strategy and sheer will, depending on teammates, exploring leadership as you bring younger players onto the team. It’s the quiet intensity of the bus ride to a championship game and the ride home, which could be jubilation or hushed disappointment.
Over the next several months, in letters to families, I will be sharing key areas of work in our strategic plan, including ambitious plans for our campus, imagining the next generation of an athletics program that matches our excellence in academics and the arts and growing into our vision for the Center for Experiential Learning. But I wanted to start that series by sharing with you this comprehensive idea of what we believe education really should be in this age of change, uncertainty, opportunity and challenge.
Growing into well-developed capability in many domains, growing into the inherent goodness of who we are as human beings, learning to know the world broadly and coming to imagine one’s place in it — this is the work that inspires us as educators at Abington Friends School and provides a deep context for the exciting plans that we see coming to fruition now and over the next few years.
Thank you for choosing this vision of education for your child. Great schools have a strong sense of shared purpose among all constituents. Our clarity of vision and values makes for a powerful cumulative experience for our students, and we believe gives them deep strengths to power a lifetime of meaning, purpose and contribution. I look forward to sharing plans for the future more fully with you in the weeks ahead.
All the best,
Rich Nourie
Head of School
