Chapter 3 - IV
Our student government system was not unique with as, but was indicative of the fact that our school was student oriented, that it's government was jointly ran by the whole school population, with great respect for each individual, and that the adults were superior only in academic attainments. One of the earliest indications of this equality and freedom for all of as, young and old, was the first joint effort to write a school catalogue. We had the usual difficulties creating such a feature. We had the same difficulty two decades later, without having any significant success in between. We did manage to write a few sentences about the type of school we were, namely, we were small, coeducational, informal, college preparatory, and with unusual facilities in fields fields of the arts and the sciences. During all the years we were at the school, these elements prevailed as features, and they formed an institutional character that became known, mostly on the Eastern seaboard, but among the top ranking colleges of the country. We were known as a person school, with a respect for the individual that was obviously carried out, and our change, our difference, from the traditional school was melcome and evident.
-- David Bailey, [Tape I p.8-9]
None of David's successors would understand the significance of the catalogue question The clearest sign that David was in control of the Country School by the fall of 1947 (as Ken Webb began his lame duck year), is that the school ceased to have a formal catalogue. The three earlier catalogues were all essentially Ken's work, albeit revised or approved by others. While largely consonant with David's values, those catalogues have a literal mindedness that David must have found uncomfortably constraining. He hated to be pinned down too closely, for fear it would cost him flexibility later on when he needed it. No doubt he had been at least partly pleased that first fall of the school, when the community's effort to write a constitution collapsed, not only because David had a strong, anglophiliac sympathy for the unwritten rule, but also because held experienced Black Mountain's determination to avoid codification, so that values might shape the institution rather than the other way around. [Duberman p.24]

None of David's successors would understand the significance of the catalogue question, all would belabor themselves and others to pin the school in print and none would really succeed, though one came closer than the rest. Indeed David"s immediate successor would boast that the school finally had its first catalogue in more than twenty years, thinking this was a sign of order and progress rather than mere mainstream incomprehension. For the fact was that the school had had a catalogue for many of those years, just not a traditional one. This catalogue comprised a 16-page photo brochure, supplemented by an annually revised Bulletin of Information. The only text other than captions in the brochure was David's brief summary of Woodstock's essentials: flexibility, atmosphere, and good teachers (which appears in full in the introduction).

David's point about the catalogue was process. Having students and faculty struggle with the problem of defining the school, articulating what was or should be good about their community, would move them all toward realizing it in day to day life. That was what was important. And if an actual catalogue came out of the process, so much the better, but the catalogue was never more important than serving as a screen for making it easier to talk about values that were often difficult to approach directly.

On the other hand, the student government system, [see Ch 2, p.17f] which David called "the most important element in all the years that we ran the school," dealt directly with personal values, and by implication with institutional values. The mechanism for this was the "group system" which comprised five sets of increasingly broad privileges which were granted to students for what might as well have been called "good citizenship" in the Country School community. Students began with no group at all and had to apply to the student council one group at a time, starting with Group One, which allowed room study -instead of evening study hall. While groups granted by the student council could be and frequently were turned down by the faculty, it is unlikely that the faculty ever granted groups not first approved by the student council.

Even in the school's first few months, its government was not really "run by the whole school population," as David claimed. There were experiments years later with community meeting governance, but not while David was headmaster. Once he was in charge, he delegated much decision-making, but the community understood that all decisions were subject to David's modification or reversal -- and not always on the more conservative side. More than once the faculty was offended by David's willingness to keep a student they wanted expelled, just as there were times he expelled students they would have kept -- but always he acted with the individual in mind, trying to do what would be best for that person under the circumstances. As a result he was seen as trying to be fair even when he was obviously unfair.

For all his real or imagined inconsistencies or contradictions, David Bailey's values are universally perceived as different from those of Ken Webb, whether for better or worse. The Webbs put the difference in terms of "discipline," and there is some undeniable truth in that, but not the whole truth, for David valued "discipline" too, though in different ways. The fundamental difference between Ken and David was that Ken believed students should be taught and therefore discipline should be imposed by others, whereas David believed students would learn and therefore self-­discipline should be encouraged. Their differences were really matters of nuance and emphasis, which show up most clearly not in any abstract statement of principle which most reasonable persons might accept, but in daily practice -- or as Albert Camus said in quite a different context, "To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in a time of peace, but war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style."

The underlying values beneath David"s style, values that he rarely tried to articulate directly, were something he took as given, the "eternal verities" as one teacher put it. He always disliked trying to articulate a "philosophy" for the school, feeling it ended up sounding like pontification, or just like the claims of other schools, none of which could be lived up to because the school was made up of people with their inevitable human frailties. David and Peggy did not have long discussions defining their values because, as she put it, they both knew what the "verities" were anyway, and that they included, among other things, "courage, steadfastness in the face of adversities, understanding of and sympathy with one's fellows, devotion to truth even when it meant hardship for oneself, and a belief in justice and disciplined liberty." [Peggy letter 11.1.84]

While they never formalized a set of values for whichWoodstock would stand for all time, Peggy identifies several elements that Ken and David agreed on, or which were later emphasized by David as he ran the school: "One of the basic principles was obviously coeducation. I was used to it -- ­David was not, because Harvard was not in those days. But I remember at Black Mountain Mr. Rice, who believed strongly in coeducation, used to say that you've got to regard girls not just as girls, somebody that you can have sex with or that you go out with to dances and see occasionally. They are human beings, and you have to learn to live with them. I remember David's being very struck by that.

"Then there was a great emphasis, even in those days, a great emphasis on art, music, and eventually dramatics, all of which stemmed from Black Mountain, and which both David and I regarded as an enormously important part of the curriculum. We were one of the first schools, when we were at our height, who gave academic credit for drama, and the colleges accepted it. It wasn't heard of before, drama was one of those 'off' things that you did with little clubs.

"We also believed in discipline, intellectual discipline, in writing, reading, and understanding -- and also discipline in behavior, particularly as it affected the community; not doing anything that would hurt the community, by reputation and so on; not breaking any of its rules, which were common sense rules; not being a gossip or a talebearer; doing your utmost and then even more than you thought you were capable of to help the school." [Peggy Int 6.28.82 p.18,20]

Another fundamental difference between David and Ken was religion. The Webbs were devoted Quakers, Ken had wanted to have a Quaker school, and he surrendered that idea only slowly, as his efforts at persuasion proved fruitless. David was neither an anti-religious man, nor an obviously religious one. While he ran the school there was chapel every morning, vespers every Sunday, and the mild, pro forma religious flavor common to baccalaureate, commencement, and similar occasions. The chapels and vespers were sometimes traditional services with hymns and prayers, but perhaps as often they were taken over by faculty, students, or visitors who talked about concerns that were not immediately recognizable as religious, things like jazz, poetry, or military conscription. There was never any question that Woodstock would be anything but nominally Christian in a nominally Christian society, but for David that meant a lack of insistence on ritual or dogma, a broad tolerance of diversity, the essence of the gospel of Mark 9:40, "For he that is not against us is for us," a spirit of confident acceptance rare enough in secular life and often cause for bloody persecution by religious authorities.

"David used to say that Christianity was the most practical religion in the world," Peggy recalls. "David went to church very seldom. He went to the Episcopal Church when we lived in Woodstock, because he sang in the church choir, but that he enjoyed, because he was a good singer, he'd had singing lessons when he was young, and he had a very good voice. He didn't go to church as a habit at all, but he used to say it was the most practical religion there was -- I think he meant this business of learning to live with other people, putting up with their faults, turning the other cheek, repaying evil with good, et cetera. All this in the end was a practical way of running a community. And David himself was, I think, extraordinarily 'Christian' in that he very, very seldom -- in fact I can't remember his bearing a grudge even when people did things that should have embittered him." [Peggy int 6.28.82 p.18-20]

During the first decade of the Country School, those things were for the most part still in the future. Throughout the forties, David's powers were waxing, the school was becoming more and more his, but more than that it was growing in size and reputation.