Academics

At Germantown Friends School, we are committed to providing an education that is fresh and relevant. Navigating the past, present, and future, we explore what is new and newly forming, and we are committed to studying, celebrating—and interrogating—the classical, too.  Education at GFS has many dimensions and many faces—we teach and learn under a big tent, animated by the idea that learning is joyous and best undertaken with many different voices involved. 

To participate in GFS involves a search for truth, one that has its origins in Quakerism—a seventh-grader compares the lives of an indentured servant and a slave in the 19th-century, thereby learning foundational truths for this American life.  A second-grader investigates a disemboweled computer, delightedly learning for herself how it works. The truth is undertaken when high school students use the devised movement process to help discover and choreograph dance pieces for an adaptation of The Suppliant Maidens. And when students perch on stools in a Wade Science Center lab, exploring chemistry and climate change,  molecular and global truths come simultaneously into view.

Learning at GFS involves all of our ages, all of our areas of study, and our whole community, but it is also deeply individual and as small as the hand of a three-year-old learning to draw the letter A right at the beginning of the journey.