Quaker spices

using them

I was in a Friends school yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t a long visit but it was freshing and smile-inducing seeing so many bright faces.

I heard, in the Worship Service, perhaps three dozen 1st and 5th graders share their appreciations of their grandparents for heartfelt reasons. Each one spoke with poise as they stood in front of about 350 strangers that blew my mind. I certainly had no confidence to do that until I got to graduate school where running a seminar was the rule so I could no longer avoid speaking to people in a crowded room. These kids were between 5 and 11 years old.

I visited a classroom, learned that 5th graders know infinitely more (this is no joke) about poetry than I do, heard an orchestra and a band concert with 4th and 5th graders where the advances in skills were so apparent.

The walls had the array of student colouring from classes as well as the obligatory signage one expects. Then I came upon this on one of the bulletin boards.

From what I saw in an acknowledgely brief encounter with some excited students, this is being baked into their lives. Not a single child was rude to another and adults, while herding cats, were respectful and patient, no mean feat on a drenching Friday at the end of April with hundreds of people milling around. Not one person yelled at another. Not one.

Why aren’t these universal spices of our American life?

Where did we go wrong because too often these seem too often the 6 most distant spices we model for our children, much less our nation or even the world we so proudly ‘lead’?

Finally, what am I doing to assure I am baking them into my own behaviour? FIN