The Sub-Textual Religion: Quakers, the Book, and Public Education in Philadelphia, 1682-1800

The history of Quaker ambivalence towards things intellectual, as it transpassed in Philadelphia, impinges upon an understanding of the vital connection Quakers provided between key features of medievality and modernity, the communal church of love and the public school classroom. The inner intellectual and spiritual life of Friends, with its inherent interplay between community, spirituality, enlightenment, and politics, offers historians a vehicle through which to analyze the complex relations between society, politics, and religion in eighteenth-century British America.

From their founding in the 1650s, Friends continually viewed with skepticism the intellectual world conveyed through and represented by the book, but, nonetheless, appreciated that literacy could augment internal Quaker unity.

The pressure they encountered as urban sectarian leaders pushed Friends in Philadelphia to educate both their own children as well as those outside the religious community. The inherent emphasis in these schools on Quaker manners and literature rather than high literacy reflected both the aftermath of the Keithian Controversy and the tense, competitive relations between Friends and their political rivals, Anglicans and Presbyterians, a tension that eased in years of relative political quietude, allowing Friends to develop both their schools and their intellectual beliefs in ways surprisingly attuned with Lockean philosophy.

During the turbulent 1770s, when religious views mandated their withdrawal from politics, Friends soon yearned to exclude non-members from their schools. While their precarious political position precluded the adoption of such exclusionary policies, a growing identification with the disenfranchised encouraged Quakers to focus instead upon the separate education of blacks and girls. Friends thus came to display a certain Republican prescience in encouraging children to assume the distinct but reciprocal roles of grown men and women. Friends separated male and female students and employed distinctive pedagogies for each. These various separatist tendencies culminated in 1799 with the creation of Westtown, an exclusive, sex-segregated, Friends boarding school intended to immerse Quaker youth in manners, the old touchstone of Quaker education and spirituality in Philadelphia.

In these events, Friends lay the groundwork for public education in the New Republic and opened the debate over the structure of American society and citizenship.