Moses Brown School is a Quaker school located in Providence, Rhode Island, offering pre-kindergarten through secondary school classes. It was founded in 1784 by Moses Brown, a Quaker abolitionist, and is the 69th oldest preparatory school in the country. The school motto is Verum Honorem, "For The Honor of Truth," and the school song is "In the Shadow of the Elms," a reference to the large grove of elm trees that still surrounds the school.
Founder
, the school's founder, was a member of the Brown family, a powerful mercantile family of New England. Brown was a pioneering advocate of abolition of slavery, co-founded Brown University, and an industrialist.
History
In 1777 a committee of New England Yearly Meeting which included Brown, took up the idea for a school to educate young Quakers in New England. The school opened in 1784 at Portsmouth Friends Meeting House in Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, However, in the years after the American Revolution there was a shortage of student and teachers. Four years later the Yearly Meeting decided to close the school. During those years, Moses Brown worked to restart the school, and, as treasurer of the school fund, was able to convince the Yearly Meeting to reopen the school – in part by donating the land in Providence for the school to be built on. The school reopened in 1819 in Providence. Moses Brown joined with his son Obadiah and his son-in-law William Almy to pay for the construction of the first building, which still serves as the main building of the school. Obadiah Brown also left $100,000 in his will to the school, a sum unheard of at the time for a school endowment or gift. In 1904 the school was renamed "Moses Brown School" to honor its benefactor and advocate. It offered an "upper" and "lower" school for "younger boys". As the Quakers were early advocates of gender equality, Moses Brown School was a co-educational school. However, in 1926 it became a boys-only school as was the fashion in U.S. society at the time. As attitudes again became more liberal, it again became coed in 1976. Well-known faculty over the years included the twin Quaker educators Alfred and Albert Smiley in the mid-Nineteenth Century and noted children's authorScott Corbett in the 1960s. "Moses Brown School: A History of its Third Half-Century" by Bill Paxton, covers the school's history during the period 1919–1969. the school was owned by New England Yearly Meeting, with its own Board of Overseers, and operated independently of the yearly meeting. The school was examining the possibility of changing its specific affiliation while still retaining its identity as a Quaker school.
Academics
Ninth and tenth grade students are offered limited flexibility in their courses, aiming to expose them to a varied selection of topics. English is the only subject mandated through four years in the Upper School. Students must take calculus in order to satisfy their mathematics requirement, study a single language for three years, and lab sciences for two. There is a requirement for a comparative religions class. Students are also required to take a minimum of two semesters of fine art courses. Students are required to participate in varied school activities whether athletic, theater, dance or community service.
The school briefly made headlines during the January 2015 nor'easter when Headmaster Matt Glendinning released a music video called "School Is Closed", in which he parodied "Let It Go" from Frozen.
