WHERE THERE'S A WILL: THE STORY OF INDIAN SPRINGS SCHOOL

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2005 by Jones, Pam

Millionaire Harvey Woodward's last will and testament set out a vision for an educational Utopia in minute detail, but it would take a man like Louis "Doc" Armstrong to make it work.

INDIAN SPRINGS SCHOOL is being created at a time when mankind is adrift," wrote the authors of the school's original prospectus in 1952. "The confused state of affairs in the world offers both a threat and a promise. The threat is the destruction of civilization itself. The promise is the creation of a better world."

Harvey G. Woodward was a man who wanted to help make a better world. The heir to an industrial fortune, he envisioned a series of schools throughout the southeast that could take average boys and turn them into "well-rounded men." Dr. Louis E. Armstrong also wanted to make the world better. Selected to make Woodward's dream a reality, Armstrong envisioned a college preparatory school that would teach boys of all races and religions to think for themselves and govern themselves. The story of how these two different visions came together at last is the story of the Indian Springs School. Within a few years of its opening, this small experimental school would attract national attention for its faculty's unorthodox approach to secondary education, providing an individualized educational community that remains unique in Alabama.

A native of West Virginia, Harvey G. Woodward was born into money. His father and uncle had founded the Woodward Iron Company, which had grown since the 1880s from a small Birmingham foundry into the nation's largest independent and completely integrated manufacturer of pig iron. As an adult, Woodward had made a career for himself as a real estate magnate, with homes in Maine and Alabama. "Wealth was thrust upon me," Woodward wrote shortly before his death, "and my Scotch-Irish conscience revolts at it being wasted or used for purposes less valuable than the greatest possible benefit to the nation." For Woodward, who never had children of his own, that benefit was the education of boys.

Having attended the Massachusetts institute of Technology, Woodward admired what was forward-looking and scientific in education, and he was dismayed by the state of schools in the Deep South. The college preparatory schools, he thought, combined outdated curricula with social elitism, and in the public schools, "the evils of mass education" destroyed most young boys' interest in learning. In the years preceding his death, Woodward visited private boys' schools throughout the United States and Great Britain. While at the schools, he met with educators in an effort to determine the needs of "average boys." In June 1929, less than two years before his death, he signed a will that set out in minute detail his vision of an educational Utopia, from the broadest tenets of its philosophy to aspects of its daily operation to personal, racial, and geographic restrictions guiding the selection of students, faculty, headmaster, facilities, even the laborers hired to maintain the grounds.

Woodward believed that learning should not consist of rote memorization, but should rather "train the mind and body of the pupil so that he may apply his own faculties to facts which come to his knowledge throughout life and arrive at sound and proper conclusions." In his emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking, he was much in line with other proponents of what was usually called "Progressive" education. Shaped by the research and philosophy of men like John Dewey, this movement had reached a peak of influence in the 1920s when Woodward sat down to plan his schools. He rejected established schoolroom conventions such as grades, examinations, the study of foreign languageseven the idea of dividing the curriculum into separate departments-in favor of personalized learning by hands-on experience: "The object shall be to give the pupils a composite picture of reasonable and discriminating comprehension of the world in which he lives and not special knowledge or faculty in any particular subject." Additionally he banned fraternities and secret societies, and forbid teachers from providing religious instruction. "Much effort will be given to unteaching that which is not true," he wrote acerbically.

Woodward's detailed stipulations also emphasized racial and cultural purity. This represents a darker thread of the Progressive movement's broad tapestry-a "scientific" racism distinct, in its proponents' minds, from conventional bigotry. Students for Woodward's schools were to be white, male, "sound and normal in mind and body (cripples excluded)," and they were to be examined to make sure of their mental and physical health before admittance. No Jewish student, "referring to his race not his religion," could be eligible for admission. Woodward insisted that blacks be excluded even from the school's kitchen and building staff, fearing "the probability of pupils unconsciously acquiring [their] type of actions, language ... and way of thinking."

The will was made public shortly after Woodward's 1930 death and its contents caused a sensation-a fortune estimated at over seven million dollars given to philanthropy at a time when the nation as a whole, and Birmingham in particular, was reeling from the onset of the Great Depression. National newspapers, even TIME magazine, mentioned the multimillionaire's extraordinary legacy. The headline in the New York Times read, "Alabaman Left $7,500,000 to Found Schools; Bans Girls, Aliens, Preachers and Languages."