Carolina Friends School

[EduCativ]

Carolina Friends School is a vibrant and inclusive learning community empowering students to think critically, creatively, and independently. We foster active exploration and quiet reflection, individual endeavor, and collaborative engagement. Inspired by Quaker values — the pursuit of truth, respect for all, peaceful resolution of conflict, simplicity, the call to service — we teach our children that it is possible to change the world.
At Carolina Friends School, "we teach our students that it is possible to change the world." Even the youngest children learn that they have capacity and agency. Their thoughts and actions matter. By harnessing their imagination, developing their skills, and working intentionally and diligently, they learn that they can improve their lives and the lives of others.
Whether it be collecting for area families affected by food insecurity, exchanging ideas and working with migrant workers in North Carolina, advocating for legislation in Raleigh and Washington, D.C., organizing student diversity leadership conferences, supporting schools in Topchi, Afghanistan, or designing agricultural tools from upcycled materials as part of a permaculture class to advance environmental sustainability efforts on campus, CFS students embrace the audacious challenge and optimism of our mission statement to make a tangible difference in the lives of others.
Bold visioning and decisive action have been at the heart of Carolina Friends School since its inception. From our founding in 1962 as the first integrated school in the state, we have embraced all kinds of diversity, understanding that inclusive classrooms produce better outcomes for all children. Most importantly, the school has always been guided by what is best for children.
Today the school thrives on a beautiful, wooded 126-acre campus and two satellite Early School campuses that excite students' imaginations, creates space for children to showcase their existing passions and discover new ones, teaches the skills necessary to thrive in a future that has not yet come to be, and nurtures the soul. Guided by the Quaker values of simplicity, peace, equality, and truth, the CFS staff are dynamic and talented educators who are passionate about their work and forge lasting relationships with students as learning partners.
We are an independent Quaker school, which means that we are secular, inclusive, and powerfully guided by Quaker values. We retain close relationships with the Durham and Chapel Hill Friends Meetings (with at least eight members serving on our Board of Trustees at any time), and we hold membership in the Friends Council on Education (FCE). Most students, parents, and teachers at CFS are not Quaker. They follow varied religious traditions or none at all, but our identity as a Friends School is central to who we are.
Quakers believe in each individual's ability to become their best self, the power of community, and the importance of acting for the greater good. The Religious Society of Friends began in mid-seventeenth-century England as a Christian group focused on the "Inner Light" of each individual, empowering direct personal spiritual experience without creeds, doctrine, or clergy.
While there are no set beliefs in Quakerism, you will often see a collaborative group of goals, called testimonies: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship (SPICES). These testimonies are threads in Quaker query and practice's larger organic life: to ask essential questions to discern what actions are motivated by those questions. This requires reflection, mindfulness, and a balancing of the inner self and outer world.
Carolina Friends School is a vibrant and inclusive learning community empowering students to think critically, creatively, and independently. We foster active exploration and quiet reflection, individual endeavor, and collaborative engagement. Inspired by Quaker values — the pursuit of truth, respect for all, peaceful resolution of conflict, simplicity, the call to service — we teach our children that it is possible to change the world.
At Carolina Friends, learning is dynamic, experiential, and interactive. Students encounter open-ended questions, undertake original projects of real relevance, explore the natural world, and immerse themselves in service-learning. In doing so, they build impressive powers of critical, creative, and independent thinking and expression.
It is an exceptional education shaped by a clear set of beliefs: a commitment to Quaker values, a love of children, and a sense of hope for the communities, local and global, they will soon lead and serve. It is learning with a purpose, it is learning in nature, it is learning in the territory of ideas, it is learning in a relationship, it is learning that is global and experiential, it is learning that is empowered, it is learning with a sense of high and hopeful expectation.

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