Our flexibility is maintained so that we may remain receptive to new ideas, and able to shift our methods to suit new demands and individual needs."

For all that many people have always thought of the Woodstock Country School as David Bailey's school, it was also more than that. In great part that was because he really meant what he said about flexibility and freedom for teachers, and he really tried to find teachers and staff who cared about other people. Although none of the school's brochures or catalogues spell it out, what David wanted for the Country School was a strong sense of family. Students and faculty sensed this, they refer to its extended-family quality or to its close-knit community in their reminiscences, That is perhaps the most important single quality cited by people trying to explain the value and the power of the place. Because the school was small, isolated, intensely introspective, it had an intimacy and an intensity which few people would find in their later lives, and which some people never experience (and therefore perhaps doubt its existence). But it was real, almost palpable, and it permeated every level of the community from academic to social to romantic, giving the place its very special spirit.

The spirit of the place was what made it so important, so vital in the lives of most of its students and teachers. The spirit of the place kept it going long after it had ceased to be a school in anything but name. The spirit of the place goes on, part of the larger contrarian, independent, quirky tradition that again and again keeps the dominant American conformity from making life completely rigid and hopeless. The spirit of the Country School survives in all the spontaneous, cheerful, idiosyncratic, caring gestures of its scattered population.

That’s part of what David meant when he wrote, "There is no formula for education." Writing for a brochure in 1955, as he and the school were reaching the peak of their powers, David expressed as well as he ever would what made the Country School such a special and excellent place for adolescents to be. Like them, David was ever reluctant to commit words to paper, to write anything like a statement of purpose or a philosophy for the school. Insofar as these things were ever done, they were done first by his early co-director and then by various of his successors, but with each of the later attempts, something essential of David's school slipped away, lost, forgotten, or destroyed.

For about 20 years -- there were ambiguous periods at both the beginning and the end -- the Woodstock Country School truly was David's school at heart. No one doubted it, few challenged it. He was like the weather and the landscape, always changeable and always there, he was the abiding environment which defined the rest of the school, and made it possible.

He was a benign dictator, he knew that and admitted it even then. His authority was absolute, sometimes arbitrary, and rarely questioned. But he also exercised it subtly as much as he could, preferring by indirection to find directions out. His style was 99 and 44/100s% pure mystique. He wanted students to be free to grow up to be themselves. He nudged them on with the casual remark, the apparently impulsive gesture, the genuine interest, the passing discussion. Only when these failed did he resort to the traditional, formal conference and discussion. His office was largely in his head and he spent as much time out and about in the school as he could -- not only teaching an English or geography or even a Spanish section, but coaching baseball and soccer, playing bridge and chess in the common room, or just hanging out, it seemed, in the halls. Of course all the students soon learned that his purposelessness was full of purpose, but they never knew whose name was on the agenda till the moment came, which created a certain excitement, anticipation, fear. As one alumna recalled, "David always looked at you as if he knew all about what you'd been doing last night, so the sensible thing was to confess."

Sometimes David developed fixed preconceptions about a student, which usually made life difficult for both of them. But in spite of his efforts to make that student come out "right," he was probably pleased by the independence of those who found their own, different self-definitions. Trouble is, you could never be sure, he wouldn't say, his enigmatic smile was supposed to be enough, or else he really couldn't be direct. Whatever the reason, the result was that he left many students feeling unworthy, feeling the need to prove themselves to David for much of the rest of their lives, whether that took the form of drifting away feeling like a failure, or performing a lifelong series of services which never quite succeeded in winning that final approval.

For teachers it was much the same. As English teacher Peter Sauer recalls, "I know David was frustrated by teachers who were unable to understand that their individual relationships with the kids were equally as important as the subject matter they were teaching.... But the afternoon was really David's time and he would spend time with the baseball team, he came to tea, at least in the first years I was there he came to tea almost every afternoon. And the afternoons was when David had his relationships with the students. I remember remarking on several occasions as a teacher there, that the school felt like it was David's canvas and we were the tubes of paint. The teachers were the tubes of paint, not the paint itself, but the tubes that held the paint and David was the one who wielded the brush.... And David believed we should remake the school every time a new student walked in." [SAUER 1-A, p.4]

When it opened in 1945, the Country School was progressive, but hardly revolutionary, either in design or result. The school borrowed elements from the places that had figured strongly in the backgrounds of its co-founders, places such as Black Mountain College, the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, and the Friends Schools of the northeast. But because it was small, intimate, coeducational, open, and encouraging to a free exchange of ideas it seemed a remarkable oasis in an all too narrow and fearful time in the recent American past. All the school really did was to re-articulate some of our best values, but this seemed rather brave at a time when so many others were running scared from "communism," responsibility, freedom, anything too complicated for a slogan and therefore somehow threatening.

But the school was not founded as a political institution, as that term is typically understood. The school did not have a social agenda or present manifestos to the world. The founders were far too traditional for that. Both David Bailey and Ken Webb were deeply conservative in the sense that, insofar as they sought change, they sought it slowly, deliberately, as a controlled and orderly process. Their school was more a variation on traditional American education than a rejection of it, an effort to put humane values ahead of the efficiency, control, and absoluteness valued in other systems. So far as one can tell from the record they left behind, neither man truly appreciated the revolutionary implications of the school's basic premises -- because for the school to succeed in the ways they imagined would require radical and profound changes in human nature itself.

But in its early years -- as for most of its existence - the school was more concerned with surviving than with changing the world, which was never a very high priority in any case, and certainly not a realistic one. Nevertheless, for most of its 35 years, WCS provided a safe haven for all manner of people listening to different drummers. Together they mostly enjoyed a shared experience of a strong, positive, communal way of living. Woodstock would remain a strong influence in their lives for the rest of their lives, and many of their lives would be changed for the better by their experience in the hills of Vermont.

But David had no successors, he groomed none, nor did he prepare the institution to carry on after his premature departure with emphysema after the summer term of 1967. For the next 13 years a bitterly divided board of trustees, and then a bitterly divided faculty struggled with only limited success to carry on. The school closed forever in August 1980 after an uneven 35 years of educating or trying to educate or, eventually, failing to educate adolescents.

So what?

That, in effect, is what one alumna asked during her interview for this book. A member of the class of 1965 and a former trustee as well, she doted on David. But she lost interest in the school after he retired, quietly faded away from her trustee responsibilities, and devoted her energies to Amnesty International and its worldwide efforts to stop political torture. That, she said is immediate, real, it means something if you keep someone from being tortured; compared to that, what does it matter if a little privileged school in New England runs out of breath?

For all her intimacy with the school, she seems not to have grasped what kind of education it stood for, and why it was universally important: because it educated people for whom torture is not acceptable.