Unbroken Community: The Story of the Friends' School, Saffron Walden, 1702-1952 (review)

Book Reviews51 Unbroken Community: The Story of the Friends' School, Saffron Waiden, 1702-1952. By David W. Bolam. Cambridge: W. Heller & Sons, Ltd. 1952. x, 184 pages. 10s. 6d. TP HIS history of Saffron Waiden, an English Quaker School, will have a strong appeal for those who are interested in the roots and growth of the theory of Friends' education. The school was originally founded as a workhouse for the destitute of the London area, and cared for the aged as well as for children. It seems at first a far cry from the present up-to-date boarding school to that austere eighteenth-century charitable institution in which, although its methods and philosophy were advanced for the times, it was considered with regard to the children that "... we should endeavor to break their Wills whilst they are little, and as soon as ever they are capable, to make them sensible that their Wills ought to be entirely subjected to ours . . . ." The school, during the two hundred and fifty years of its existence, has moved three times, and changed radically in character. At first it accepted within its walls adults as well as children, and educated the latter for the grossest manual trades; gradually it evolved into the modern boarding school which deals with children only, considerably more than two-thirds of whom are prepared for such skilled professions as teaching, medicine, engineering, secretarial work, and the arts. Its graduates come from varying backgrounds, both financial and otherwise , and the isolated protective education of the early days, "hedged from evil," has given way to a preparation to enable the student on leaving school to cope with the problems of the modern world; this is accomplished through exposure to a common ideal expressed through the lives of the teachers, Friends and non-Friends alike. In spite of this striking evolution to an institution so markedly different from the original one, the school's development over two and a half centuries is shown by the author, David Bolam, to have meant the persistence of an unbroken community which has always been the expression of a fellowship of concern, of caring for the individual, and the fostering of the whole personality, including its deepest levels. The form of the expression has varied, adapting itself to the times, but the chain has been unbroken. The book is full of delightful and revealing anecdotes, particularly those dealing with the earliest days, and although the text does not perhaps always fill in the atmosphere and background of each period sufficiently to hold the popular reader's sustained attention, it is valuable and stimulating reading for the person who has a serious interest in Quaker schools. Richmond, IndianaHelen G. Hole ...