Growing Pains:Quaker Benevolence and School Expansion in Philadelphia's Educational Marketplace, 1689–1798 Grant Scribner (bio) Abstract In 1689, Quaker leaders opened the first Friends school in Philadelphia to educate their children in an environment aligned with their values. The Board of Overseers opened more Friends schools over the course of the eighteenth century and began educating non-Quakers and students who could not afford to pay for schooling, reflecting both their charitable impulses and increasing demand for education in Philadelphia. While administrators and teachers made decisions with a wider educational market in mind, internal debates about Friends' civic and moral responsibilities to non-Quakers also shaped conceptions of education. Though Friends attempted to define the boundaries between Quakerism and the encroaching "spirit of the world," balancing benevolent school expansion with attempts to protect the sect's coherence proved a challenge. Quaker school leaders' decisions about staffing, student enrollment, and the objectives of schooling illustrate broader changes in the city's educational landscape, and the process of Quaker school expansion reflected Friends' deep-seated ambivalence about balancing educational charity and religious purity. Quaker schools, Friends schools, eighteenth-century education, Board of Overseers, student enrollment In 1771, Jonathan willis ran out of options. After operating his own school in Philadelphia for seven years, he could not find enough students to meet expenses. Like many other entrepreneurial teachers during the eighteenth century, Willis taught students on a pay-as-you-go basis, stringing together extra income with odd jobs whenever demand for his teaching dwindled. Willis, a Quaker, attempted to save his livelihood by petitioning the Board of Overseers of the William Penn Charter School: "Dear Friends I send [this] to Beg the favour of you, to let me have some of your free scholars; for I find that the incomes of my school [End Page 26] and all other business I can employ myself with will not pay the rent . . . I have had several poor sorts of children to teach till they were 7 years old and then they were taken away and sent to your free schools."1 Willis's petition illuminates the history of education in eighteenth-century Philadelphia in two ways. First, Willis characterized the overseers' actions purely in economic terms, not as guided by religious benevolence. As a Quaker teacher in the market for "poorer sorts" of paying students, Willis saw the charity of Quaker schools as direct competition. Second, he described the overseers' influential position within a broader market. The overseers took students away from independent teachers but could also redistribute revenue by moving students back to well-regarded teachers in a loose "farming out" system. Jonathan Willis's petition allows us to reconsider Philadelphia's Quaker schools in the context of historians' recent attempts to explain the dynamics of colonial education.2 The reach of the overseers' patronage widened beyond Penn Charter in the mid-eighteenth century, as they supervised the creation and administration of a network of Quaker schools in Philadelphia. Staffing difficulties and persistent questions of ultimate educational objectives, however, reveal the rough edges of the city's shifting market for education. [End Page 27] Eighteenth-century Philadelphia offers historians a unique opportunity to explore the educational marketplace. Philadelphia's economic and religious diversity gave consumers more educational choice than any other American city during the period, as church schools, venture schools, and academies sprang up in great numbers.3 Historian Nancy Beadie has argued for the importance of academies that put "competitive pressure" on both church schools and entrepreneurial teachers by "bringing the kinds of instruction offered by Latin grammar schools and English venture schools together in one place." While Beadie examines academies' development in a market context, she does not explore the effects on church schools. Sketching the position of Quaker schools and teachers in response to increased competition augments her portrait of the educational marketplace in colonial America.4 Scholars have traditionally approached Quaker education as an offshoot of the Friends' various charitable endeavors, but viewing Friends' schools in a market context augments and enriches the story.5 The expansion and secularization of Quaker schools took place during a period of tumultuous change for Quakers in Philadelphia. While...