The mission of Indian Springs School is to develop in students a love of learning, a sense of integrity and moral courage, and an ethic of participatory citizenship. The school is a community of talented boarding and day students in grades 8-12.
Harvey G. Woodward, whose bequest and vision made Indian Springs possible, and Dr. Louis Armstrong, our first director, shared the belief that young people could thrive best in an intellectual environment where their growth would be nurtured through the strength of the relationships among teachers and students. From the earliest writings that brought our school into being and through later texts that framed its constitution, we have referred to ourselves as the school-community, conspicuously linking the two essential cultural elements teachers and students into a single entity.
We constitute an academic village where lines that often separate the intellectual and the social have been deliberately blurred and where our school's motto, Learning Through Living, achieves its deepest and fullest meaning in the context of the school-community.
The strong bond that joins school and community in this collegial atmosphere invites students to create and maintain friendships not only with their peers but also with their teachers. In many cases, these are lifelong relationships, stretching beyond graduation, because we recognize that each individual is both learner and teacher and that learning and sharing are neither bound by time nor distance.
Our student government, led by the student mayor, is set up much like a town council: our assemblies are called town meetings. With the guidance and support of the faculty and administration, all ISS students, even those who never hold a student-government office, pass through an apprenticeship of self-governance to learn about balancing freedom with responsibility in community life. We also practice these same principles of democracy in the classroom, where students are intellectually and socially nurtured through vibrant and relevant discussions.
As we are a collegial and intellectual village, our beliefs about good teaching at Indian Springs are predicated primarily on the relationships that exist among the members of our school-community: teacher to community, teacher to class, teacher to student, teacher to parents, teacher to teacher, teacher to self, and student to student.
