George School

Founded in 1893, George School is a Quaker, coed boarding and day school for students in grades 9 through 12. It is wooded and sunny, quiet and energetic, serious and playful. It is a comfortable, stimulating place to be yourself, to discover new worlds, to help others. You can study calculus and social justice. Chinese and woodworking. Chemistry and golf. In short, George School is a great place to get ready for college. But that’s just a benefit of getting ready for life.

At George School, we believe the world can be better and society can be different. We think that the rat race isn’t the only means and majority rule (with minority suffering) isn’t the only method. It means that when you come here, you’ll ponder life, truth, and knowledge itself. You’ll read Wuthering Heights and reflect how a mid-nineteenth-century novel can make a contemporary statement. You’ll compete in sports like lacrosse or softball. You’ll write your own Canterbury tale. You’ll use pantomime to learn ceramics, iMovie to learn physics, and The New York Times to learn economics. (You may also blast music, build bonfires, and even learn to juggle.)

It happens through our incredible courses—like AP Calculus or Spanish Seminar or any of the courses in our ultra-challenging International Baccalaureate Program. And it happens because the teachers and staff are proactive and plugged in. They’re ready to offer advice, cookies, or whatever the moment calls for. So when you leave this campus, you may head off to Harvard or Haverford or Hamburg, Germany, go home to Mauritania, or return to the simplicity of a Quaker farm. But you will be different from when you came.

George School is academically rigorous. Besides offering a wide variety of Advanced Placement and other interesting, challenging classes, we are one of only a few US boarding schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program. George School promotes long-term health and physical fitness by requiring students to participate in competitive sports and in physical education classes. Sports and physical education can help students forge lifelong friendships. They teach many life lessons that shape students during their George School experience and for years to come. In most cases, a student must take at least one term of PE each year.

George School offers a variety of visual and performing arts classes, including ceramics, dance, music, painting and drawing, photography, design and production, theater, film production, and woodworking and design. Classes are offered through different levels and include Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate arts classes.

Accomplishing our goal of educating students is not simple or ordinary (at least not how we do it). For us, it’s not enough for students to acquire great knowledge about great things and be truly prepared for college. It’s not enough for them to make strides in social development, creative talent, and athletic ability.

Yes, we push our students to do all these things. But we also press them to look deep inside, to find and clarify their authentic selves, to blossom intellectually, personally, and spiritually. Students learn about the tension between individual and community, that fairness and justice are inherently tied to each other. They learn to express themselves without trampling others, asking for what they need rather than demanding what they want. Then, in what seems a fitting fulfillment of our mission, George School students joyously go out into the world comfortable in their self-awareness and confident that they can make the world a better, kinder place.

Transformative relationships between teachers and students are the heart of the George School educational experience. Based upon a powerful combination of example, mutual respect, and personal commitment, these relationships support a program that is intentionally balanced between rigor and reflection, passion and compassion. They provide the environment within which George School teachers challenge their students to hold themselves to high academic standards, to practice humility, and to develop lifelong habits of scholarship and intellectual curiosity.

The alignment of belief and action that arises when an individual decides what is important and finds a way to be true to it is summed up in George Fox’s phrase “let your life speak.” Through habits of reflection that are honed in meeting for worship, through our commitment to honor the Light of God in everyone, and by developing an understanding of the Quaker (Friends) values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, service, and stewardship, our graduates are provided with a firm foundation upon which to build lives of personal integrity.

George School is committed to being a community where people with vastly different backgrounds, identities, and perspectives are united both in their respect for the unique gifts that each brings and in pursuit of a common good. We place a high value on diversity and on the ways that our convictions, both individually and collectively, are broadened, strengthened, and enlightened when we appreciate and respect a range of perspectives. This belief is reflected in the school’s motto, “Mind the Light.”

At George School we are grounded by a sense of responsibility to each other and to the earth we inhabit. This leads us to practice good stewardship in all of our daily actions and decisions. A central Friends value, stewardship recognizes that physical, financial, natural, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual resources are to be grown and sustained for the good of all and for generations to come.