As educators, we begin each school year filled with optimism for the growth we will encourage and witness in our students. We rededicate ourselves to the Quaker practices of peace, integrity, equality, community, simplicity, and stewardship. The hope is that as our students move through our schools, these practices will help each one develop a sense of agency and self-worth, and prepare themselves to be leaders in creating a better world.
 
At Friends Council, our optimism for you and your students is tempered by the knowledge that the violence in the Middle East, which was a constant throughout the last school year, is still with us and the world. This conflict has challenged us to think deeply about what the practice of peace means for our students at Quaker schools. We must continue to find ways that might help our students, at their various developmental levels, to be people of peace and non-violence.
 
One starting point in response to the challenge are the words of Quaker educator Douglas Heath. He wrote “the mission of a Friends school is to educate for goodness, not by requiring its members to live certain truths, but by enabling them to live their lives to reveal Truth to themselves and through themselves to others. A Friends school therefore should bring each, in the words of George Fox, to the ‘teacher within’.” Heath encourages us to lean into the diversity of our school communities, to ask our students to begin to learn to balance self discovery with the obligation to listen deeply to their classmates.
 
This balancing act becomes ever more sophisticated as the world students know opens up beyond their classrooms to ultimately include the whole of the world. As we encourage our students to belong to one another, and to our school communities, tension and conflict is inevitable. We must welcome tension and encourage students to carefully consider ideas that might not be their own. It is through these interactions - interactions held in a spirit of deep respect - that our students grow in their ability to recognize and test what is true about themselves, and true about the world.   
 
Parker Palmer describes the practice of peace quite succinctly: “To be in the world nonviolently means learning to hold the tension of opposites, trusting that the tension itself will pull our hearts and minds open to a third way of thinking and acting.” Indeed, as the National Association of Friends Schools we take the opportunity to underscore the intentional work of our schools to build our students to be practitioners of peace: 

• Helping our students listen deeply in Meeting for Worship
• Encouraging students to interrogate the injustices of the world in their classrooms with one another
• Helping students to peacefully resolve conflicts with one another
• Making contributions to mend the world through service 

 At the turn of this century, many Friends schools planted peace poles on their campuses. Each face of the pole included the words, Peace is the Way, typically in multiple languages. Others hung banners with the phrase: There is No Way to Peace. Peace in the Way. These messages describe quite well what Quakers are for: Quakers are for peace. By its very design, it is an invitation to dialogue and deep thinking, pulling our hearts and minds open to a third way (as Palmer suggests). It is the practice of respectful dialogue that we must encourage the most in order for students to understand one another, and more importantly, to find the way forward so that a sense of belonging and peace is available to all.
 
Queries for reflection:

• Do I live in peace with myself and others?
• Do we recognize and address the causes of conflict and all forms of violence within our community?
• How do I try not to hurt others and help others do the same?
• How do I forgive those who have said and done things that hurt me?
• Where does peace begin? How can it start in me, grow in our school, and spread throughout the world?
• How do I try to solve problems with others using caring words and actions?