I

"Our school methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited from the period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording as they did the only access to learning, were all-important. The ideals of this period are still largely in control, even where the outward methods and studies have been changed. We sometimes hear the introduction of manual training, art, and science into the elementary, and even the secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they detract from our present scheme of generous, liberal culture. The point of this objection would be ludicrous if it were not so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided, and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art. The very fact that manual training, art, and science are objected to as technical, as tending toward were specialism, is of itself as good testimony as could be offered to the specialized aim which controls current education. Unless education had been virtually identified with the exclusively intellectual pursuits, with learning as such, all these materials and methods would be welcome, would be greeted with the utmost hospitality. "

-- John Dewey
The Child and the Curriculum (1902) [p.263]

A PROPOSAL FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A COEDUCATIONAL
PROGRESSIVE FARM BOARDING AND DAY SCHOOL IN WOODSTOCK.

I. OBJECTIVES

A. Intellectual Woodstock Country School will strive to stimulate in manifold ways intellectual curiosity, mental alertness, and pride in sound scholarship. The organization of classes, the type of men and women who will constitute the faculty, the close contact with real life thru (sic) work experience around the School itself and its farm, the weekend campus experiences made possible by the facilities of Camp Timberlake, participation in the community life of the town of Woodstock -- all these will serve to provide an environment broad and richly stimulating to a growing mind.

B. Religious. The School will endeavor to emphasize a simple, genuine type of religion, first of all thru a faculty, which, while naturally differing widely as to individual point of view on religion, will share the conviction as to its validity and importance in their own lives and the lives of their students. Brief daily chapel services will be supplemented by frequent weekend visits of inspiring men and women from outside, and by participation in (not merely attendance at) church life in the town.

C. Physical The Greek idea of developing one’s body to its maximum healths strength, agility and beauty is a goal too frequently lost sight of in the pressure of interscholastic sports competition. Woodstock Country School may eventually develop teams and take part in games with other schools, but this type of activity, fine as it is in its place, will not be allowed to overshadow other reasons for athletics rugged health and physical fitness, skill in games and in athletic activities which may become hobbies later in life.

D. Social. Among the precious intangibles which a school may give its students is that spirit of gay and generous cooperation which can come from living together, sharing common tasks, with kindly humor and Christian forbearance helping one another to grow in strength and breadth of character. Places like Pendle Hill, the Quaker graduate school near Philadelphia, Black Mountain College, Putney School, Bedales in England, and other fine institutions suited to the modern age, show that this can be done. The Nation needs more such places.

The education of boys and girls together, a feature of Friends education from the first, is more and more coming to be recognized as a most salutary and valuable experience. To know members of the other sex not only as the glamorous partners of the dance floor but in everyday situations, working and playing together, striving together for common objectives, is not only a wholesome experience but the best preparation for a sympathetic understanding of the other sex on which so much of later happiness is based.

Ken Webb, WCS prospectus (2nd ed.), March 1945

In the fall of 1944, after years of dreaming and planning, Ken Webb took the first practical steps toward opening his own school for the following school year.

 

 

 

  Ken believed deeply in the values which he wanted his school to embody. He expected Woodstock to be no less demanding of its students than he was of himself.

In the fall of 1944, after years of dreaming and planning, Ken Webb took the first practical steps toward opening his own school for the following school year. He found a good site. He started writing a prospectus for students, teachers, and backers. And he put out his first, discreet feelers for local support. While successful in raising the necessary support to open the school, Ken paid an unanticipated price for his success. The price of local support put Ken in a position of compromised authority that he soon came to regret.

Ken Webb was born in 1902, in Springfield, Mass. He attended the public primary and secondary schools there before attending Harvard University, where he graduated with honors in Greek and English literature in 1924. Nine years later he earned a Harvard M.A. in comparative literature. He started teaching in 1925 at the Storm King School, later moving on to the American University in Beirut, the Peddie School (where he was head of the Latin Department), Vermont Academy, and the Baltimore Friends School (again heading the Latin Department), among others. A short, vigorous man of intense and serious demeanor, Ken believed deeply in the values which he wanted his school to embody. He expected Woodstock to be no less demanding of its students than he was of himself. Left with a limp by a childhood brush with polio, Ken pushed his body constantly to its limits, hiking, splitting wood, clearing brush, or working out at home with barbells. His diaries show him pushing his mind and spirit just as hard. A convinced Friend, he regularly exhorted himself to do more and to be a better person doing it. ["As Sparks Fly Upward" bio; obit 11.10.84; interview]

His wife Susan was born Susan Howard in 1908 in Burlington, Vermont. Her mother, Dr. Susan E. Howard, was a suffragist and Burlington's first woman doctor, whom the male medical establishment barred from the local hospital. Her paternal grandfather, Oliver Otis Howard had served as commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau following the Civil War, and had founded Howard University in Washington, D.C. Growing up in a strong Quaker family with powerful traditions of independent thought and social responsibility, Susan developed a quiet drive that would carry her, in "retirement" in the 1970s, into an eight year career as a Vermont state legislator. She attended local public schools as a girl, then graduated from the University of Vermont in 1930, a slim, vigorous, forthright young woman determined to make a useful contribution to the world. She met Ken Webb the following year, as she was completing work for her M.A. in classics at Radcliffe College.

Years later Susan recalled the instant rapport she and Ken felt together -- both classicists, both teachers, both socially concerned: "We talked all the first evening that we met, and we never stopped talking for fifty-two years." [Vermont Woman, 10.86]

Ken and Susan Webb married in 1932, and for the rest of their lives together, theirs was a relationship based on equality, partnership, and mutual respect. At first they pursued joint teaching careers, but always with the thought that they would some day start their own, progressive school when they could raise the money. Meanwhile they did what they could afford, starting a camp in 1939 which would eventually grow into the complex of Farm and Wilderness Camps in Plymouth, Vermont (about 15 miles west of Woodstock). Ken was the director of the first camp for boys, Camp Mehrlicht, later Timberlake. In 1941 they started Indian Brook Camp for girls, which Susan directed until she and Ken retired in 1973. Based on a philosophy of cooperation and equality, eventually all the camps would have relatively rugged regimens, designed to foster both individual and group self-reliance. At the same time, the non-sectarian camps were deeply influenced by the Webbs' Quaker beliefs and global concerns.

By the fall of 1944, Ken and Susan had moved to Woodstock with their three small children. They had given up their teaching positions to devote all their energies to establishing Farm and Wilderness Camps on a solid base. Now Ken felt secure enough to turn to a new enterprise. He was 42 then, he had been thinking about and planning his own school for more than a decade, he was confident of his own abilities, he had a successful record of educational achievement. He felt he needed an assistant, as he had at Farm and Wilderness, but he was not looking for a partner.

He certainly wasn't looking for a 32 year old stranger like David Bailey, even if he was a fellow teacher who believed in progressive education. During the summer of 1943, David had suddenly started talking to family and friends about starting his own school in Woodstock, which he considered his hometown. But Ken knew only that David had an unimpressive academic record, a spotty teaching career, and a reputation for impracticality. None of this was enough to persuade him to join David in a mutual venture.

But Elizabeth Forrest Johnson was.