Let Your Schools Speak

The Power of Prefigurative Practice in Friends Education

In my role as a history teacher at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia, I got the chance a few months back to collaborate with a dear colleague and a talented group of high school students on a course called “Another World is Possible.” We studied hopeful, ambitious visions for change and strategies for achieving them—George and Berit Lakey, adrienne maree brown’s “emergent strategy,” Joanna Macy, Rebecca Solnit, degrowth, library socialism, and more. One central concept in the course was that of “prefigurative practice.”

Drawn from anarchist thought, prefigurative practice is a way of doing things based on two notions. The first is that we don’t have to wait to build institutions that will help realize the change we wish to see in the world. The other is that the institutions and practices we develop along the way ought to embody our ultimate vision. Put another way, prefigurative practice aligns its means for achieving change with the ends sought. If, for example, we are working toward a just, inclusive future, our institutions now should be just and inclusive. Prefigurative practice is proactive, courageous, and true to itself. In Quaker parlance, its life speaks. This concept has inspired and influenced me since I first encountered it, but I had never thought of Friends education as a form of prefigurative practice until very recently.

Prefigurative practice aligns its means for achieving change with the ends sought. If, for example, we are working toward a just, inclusive future, our institutions now should be just and inclusive. Prefigurative practice is proactive, courageous, and true to itself. 

At the end of January, I attended a professional development workshop on clerking and Quaker decision-making processes hosted by Friends Council on Education. One aspect of the presentation that drew my attention was its forthright acknowledgement of the atypical demands placed on participants in Quaker meetings for worship with attention to business. Adapted from Arthur Larrabee’s work on clerking, the session handouts laid out the expectations for participants in meeting for business: coming to the meeting spiritually and intellectually prepared; maintaining good order; courageously speaking and then releasing individual truth; being open to new truth, revelation, and insight; empathetic, charitable listening; and bringing “clerking consciousness” to help the meeting’s forward progress.

Now, this does not describe your typical meeting outside of Quakerism. (Indeed, it doesn’t describe many meetings that I have been a part of in a Friends school.) And that’s fine! The workshop materials and presenters were quick to draw out key institutional differences between Quaker meetings and Friends schools. Among them is the fact that participation in the life of a Quaker meeting is entirely voluntary. There’s no formal hierarchy in a meeting’s organization, as there is in a school with contractual relations and an organization chart. Schools, in contrast to meetings, are extremely complex institutions with diverse stakeholders. They often need to respond rapidly to fluid situations. These distinctions can and do warrant different approaches to decision making. Drew Smith, executive director of Friends Council on Education, suggested that decision making in the mode of meeting for business should be an ideal to which Friends schools aspire. Insofar as these practices are implemented, they support a substantive ethos in line with Quaker values.

Drew also emphasized in his presentation that this mode of decision making—and of being in community—is countercultural. It goes against mainstream practices and norms, and as such, it can feel imposing to participants, prompting ambivalent reactions in newcomers. This was the case when I recently took my brother Ryan to Sunday worship at Germantown Meeting—another countercultural institution. He went into the meetinghouse with no firsthand experience of Quakerism, and I was eager afterward to hear his impressions.

“Wow,” he said. “Everyone there takes being human very seriously.”

This was a compliment, of course. He was moved by the focused energy of a room full of people grasping together, in silent contemplation, toward greater understanding of the things that matter. His response also acknowledged the collective expectations and perceived responsibilities placed on participants, and he was a little unsure: “I really appreciate what it is, and I’m not sure that I’m up for it.” Fair enough.

This must be kept in mind as we think about Friends education today. Quaker schools serve largely non-Quaker constituencies. Many members of these communities will probably experience things like meeting for business as my brother experienced meeting for worship. Cultivating, institutionalizing, and maintaining such countercultural practices is clearly a complex and difficult task that requires commitment from school leadership and from the community. Friends Council on Education offers wonderful resources in this regard, and local Quaker meetings might also like to support schools and individual educators.

Here’s the thing: it’s worth the effort! Quaker meetings for business offer a striking alternative to the status quo, both in procedure and in ethos. In their structure and organization, they exhibit respect for each member of the group. Everyone’s voice matters; they value participants’ time by presenting and adhering to a thoughtful agenda. They invite—even demand—collaboration across differences, openness to new possibilities and unexpected outcomes, and worshipful attention to a group’s task. Having sat through a lifetime of non-Quaker meetings, I can say that this is a mode of being in community that I would like to experience more!

Before the clerking workshop, I hadn’t thought of meeting for business as a form of prefigurative practice, but isn’t it? It ignores the dominant methods for reaching decisions in favor of an alternative that brings to life the values that its practitioners wish to see in the world. Moreover, Quakers do not wait for permission from anyone to put it into practice. Meeting for business is a living alternative in the present, and therein rests great power and possibility.

What might be gained from thinking of Friends education, broadly construed, as prefigurative practice? Well, I invite you to consider the possibilities for what education might look like when it strives toward the Quaker values inscribed in the missions of Friends schools. I daresay these possibilities are countercultural, even radical. Yes: practicing Friends education in a manner that is true to its spirit yields an educational experience that can be transformative for everyone involved, offering a staggering alternative to mainstream education and the complex forces that today debase it.

Friends education in this conception honors every learner’s unique gifts, offering learning experiences that speak to differences and tap into the power of a group’s diversity. It radiates an infectious love for truth and an openness to continuing revelation. Like meeting for business, Friends education places different demands on learners—that they engage with learning and finding meaning as responsible agents: that is, as members of a community of learning with obligations to themselves and others. Friends educator Paul Lacey presents a beautiful discussion of such a community in his essay “Ethics, Ethos, and a Quaker Philosophy of Education,” wherein he argues that the capacity to create and sustain such a community is at the very core of what distinguishes Friends education.

In my individual work as a teacher, reflecting on Quaker values and seeking to apply them at school has been my guiding light since I arrived at Germantown Friends School in 2020. My teaching has become less didactic, less authoritarian, more creative, more respectful toward the light inside each student, and points the way to more and deeper engagement. It has pushed me toward a practice that tries to offer students an alternative vision of what learning and being together can be. This has been endlessly engaging and has vastly improved what I do as a teacher. I have come to see my work as a prefigurative practice rooted in Quakerism.

Giving our learners experience with an essentially different, countercultural way of doing things increases the likelihood that they will carry these practices, values, and lessons into their future. Who knows where and how the seeds might take root.

It’s easy to despair of the contemporary world. Our dominant culture and society are polarized and beset with violence, inequality, cutthroat individualism, and alienation. With climate change, profound threats to democracy, and artificial intelligence, we face staggering collective challenges vis-à-vis securing a just future in which life can flourish. In schools, learning is instrumentalized and reduced to its bearing on the college admissions process or its utility in raising performance on standardized test scores. Students become fixated on grades and completion rather than interested in learning. The humanities are collapsing as professional disciplines. Educational institutions struggle to withstand powerful forces that jeopardize their traditional roles as havens for intellectual freedom and finding meaning.

Seen from this grim but not-unrealistic perspective, Friends education as prefigurative practice takes on new importance. There simply aren’t many other educational institutions that are free to organize themselves by virtue of their very missions, as schools that represent a substantive alternative to the status quo. As I see it, it just so happens that the foundational values of Quakerism and Friends education—take the testimonies if you like—are exactly those that we will need to enact if we are to create and secure a better future.

I’ll end by noting that the prefigurative theory of change assumes that there is a certain unpredictable power to such practices. They spill over, synergize, cross-pollinate, network, and inspire. Like navigating the challenges associated with implementing Quaker decision-making practices in Friends schools, striving for pedagogies and curricula that truly embody the values of Quakerism is well worth the trouble. Giving our learners experience with an essentially different, countercultural way of doing things increases the likelihood that they will carry these practices, values, and lessons into their future. Who knows where and how the seeds might take root.