Welcome to Friends Western School
Friends Western School follows a long Quaker tradition of educating the mind, body and spirit of each child who attends. Our mission is to:
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Awaken a love of learning in each child.
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Promote academic excellence.
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Prepare children to use their knowledge with creativity and compassion.
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Practice and teach the Quaker values of harmony, simplicity, integrity, community and equality.
The goal of FWS is threefold. We seek to cultivate every child's natural gifts and multiple intelligences, to balance direct instruction and discovery so that learning becomes intrinsically rewarding, and to integrate Quaker values and spiritual inquiry in curriculum and daily practice.
FWS gives your child personal attention and we adjust our teaching methods to respond to your child's learning style. We design our instruction to balance skills and challenges so that each student experiences success. Each person in our learning community has important contributions to make. We believe all children have unique talents and will do our best to discover and nurture your child's strengths. We cherish differences, visible and invisible, as essential for teaching and learning. While we hold students to high standards of scholarship and classical skill building (spelling, math, grammar), we perceive learning not as a set of principles to be memorized but as a continual process of inquiry.
By fostering cooperation rather than competition among students, FWS creates an atmosphere that celebrates individual differences. Working together, the children learn the joys and challenges of building a community while, at the same time, gaining a sense of their individual uniqueness.