Religion: Bright Friends

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Not by a tax levy but by the Public School Society, a band of public-spirited men headed by Quakers, was founded in 1806 the first free non-sectarian school on Manhattan Island. When New York City set up a municipal school system, the Society generously handed over to the new Board of Education 20 humming little academies as a nucleus. To the city, however, the Quakers did not turn over their own famed private school, Friends Institute on Pearl Street. Last week Friends, now located in Stuyvesant Square, quietly celebrated its 150th anniversary.

On its sesquicentennial Friends Seminary, still small, had little in common with the prim Quaker academy of the 18th Century, in whose classrooms boys and girls were scrupulously segregated. Progressive Friends was one of the first schools in the U. S. to bow to the Industrial Revolution, astonished its alumni in 1846 by introducing courses in electro-magnetism and the steam engine.

To help celebrate the oldest New York school's 150th birthday, Principal Henry Lee Messner invited two famed Quakers, Swarthmore's President Frank Aydelotte and Founder Daniel Carter Beard of the Boy Scouts of America, who watched a Quaker play, a Founders' Pageant, the presentation of a carriage stone from the house of great Quaker William Penn. Of the pageant, proud Principal Messner explained: "All the costumes are bright. The Society did not use grey costumes until long after Friends was founded."