ichard Eldridge calls the query Quakerism's most characteristic form. Our most authentic statements carry within them the spirit of the question, the implicit recognition that to know experimentally or experientially requires a willingness to test belief and practice again and again in the light of new events and experience. In the light of the horror of September 11 and its aftermath, an overriding question before Quaker educators has been: Does Quaker education have relevance in a time of terror? What should we educate for at such a time? What are the values to recommend, the ways to teach, the con-tent to study, the habits to learn how to practice when our nation is at war? It is not the first nor only time Quaker education has had to address these questions.

The most influential and profound book on Quaker education in the twentieth century, Howard Brinton's Quaker Education in Theory and Practice, published in 1940, is shaped by that moment in history. Howard Brinton had served as a conscientious objector in Europe in the First World War, was director of studies at Pendle Hill during some of the worst days of the Great Depression and the brink of the Second World War. His conception of the Quaker school as an experiment in the desired social order, and his identification of four crucial testimonies of Quakerism- harmony (by which he meant both peacemaking and creating just institutions), equality, simplicity and community-all reflect his understanding of what Quaker education could contribute in a world at war, a time of terror. He says there are only two ways to change people: by persuasion or by violence. The ultimate act of violence changes living persons into dead objects, but physical punishment, deprivation, torture, threat of harm to oneself or loved ones, psychological manipulation, and lying are all powerfully effective forms of violent coercion to change people's behavior, if not their views. If one believes human beings to be children of God, however, one must depend on persuasion, not violence, to achieve change in people. Education is, above all else, persuasion- persuasion about which tasks are worth doing, which subjects worth studying, which habits worth developing. Quaker education has shaped itself, over time, to be as uncoercive as possible, to trust that good sense and good will can convince people to learn.

Howard Brinton helps me decide what I can and cannot do to change other people, and that has implications for how I act as a citizen, as a participant in a socioeconomic system, as a parent and as a teacher. But what shall I do-in all those roles-when others have declared war on me, or on my behalf? What can I do in response to ultimate violence against human beings, conscious, deliberate acts of terror as military and political tactics? What can I learn and teach which will help us confront terror and not be destroyed by it? Mary Rose O'Reilley says that her book, The Peaceable Classroom, began as a question raised by one of her graduate school professors: "Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?" The same question challenges the teacher of every subject.

A lot of news reports have made me cry recently. One has been the sight of little Irish Catholic children being escorted to school through ranks of screaming adults, Northern Irish Protestants determined to terrorize them away from school. What can education mean to those children right now? What lessons are valuable enough to them that they and their parents will endure the abuse, the threats, the actual explosions, to go every day? What are the children of those Irish Protestant adults learning from their elders' example? For whom can school be a haven, a guarded place, when a society is so torn? What are those children becoming habituated to, and what habits will shape their own adult lives? Is it possible to teach English, religion, history, math, social studies, gym, biology, so that people stop killing each other? And if not, what are we to do?

John Fothergill says that a special Quaker contribution to the spiritual life of children is to habituate them to silence, recollection and reflection. The capacity to sit still, to wait patiently, to pay attention, to recollect oneself, are spiritual as well as practical skills in learning and in daily life. To sit still and pay attention are skills for the scientist, the social worker, teacher, therapist, healer. By learning to listen and see accurately, we can also learn to wait for the evidence to take coherent shape before we act. We can learn to value accuracy, intellectual independence, truth-telling and person integrity. We know how important, educationally, psychologically, and spiritually it is for us to have developed the habits associated with meeting for worship. It is enriching to be habituated to reverence, to encounter the holy with joy and with awe, to cherish others as children of God. Also to place a high value on the beauty and order of the natural world, and on the capacity of the human imagination to empathize with people very different from ourselves.

Many of our schools have stories of the community hearing suddenly of a death and spontaneously going to the meeting house, or asking for a meeting. Within an hour of the first attacks on September 11, plans were announced for a noon vigil around the heart, the center of Earlham campus. Over 500 faculty, students, staff stood holding hands in silence. At the end, we raised our locked hands above our heads and held them there, in a wordless gesture of companionship with one another and with those who had died. We hugged, cried together, went off to talk together. There were times for silent waiting, prayer, worship. The next day an even larger group gathered in a meeting called for sharing. In Quaker schools, we are habituated to silence, attention, recollection, patient waiting, and for some, prayer and worship. Think what a gift it is to have such inner resources as second nature. Think how remarkable it is that our youngest students begin to develop such comfortable habits in themselves.

Testimonies are actions, or they are meaningless, so they need to become habits, the products of reflection and conscious choice which become second nature to us. To believe in equality requires making egalitarian behavior habitual. Believing in justice means acting justly as a habit. We see how in home life, school life, and the company of other children learn the habits which make them caring, tender toward others, respectful of the natural world. We see them as they grow older and encounter more complex situations, exposed to a wider range of acquaintances, differing points of view, pressures and temptations, testing the habits they have learned against these new realities. Kim Hays reminds us that a tradition, to remain alive, has to undergo continual translation and continual challenge and debate. So we want our schools both to guard our children and to expose them to challenge and even some kinds of risk. We want our children to be able to live in the world of work and politics, the world where injustice and violence apparently rule, and neither retreat nor surrender their deepest convictions. We want them to learn how to love, with clear eyes and critical intelligence, the best in this society and in the people who live close around us. In his "Letters to a German Friend" at the time of the Second World War, Camus writes "I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice." His friend retorts "Well, you don't love your country." Five years later, Camus thinks back to those words and says, "No, I didn't love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we loves amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving." (Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 4). To repeat, we want our children and students to be able to live in the world of work and politics, the world where injustice and violence apparently rule, and neither retreat nor surrender their deepest convictions.

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