Education: The Battle of Westwood Hills

Corinne Seeds looks like a mild-mannered schoolmarm. She is a schoolmarm, and she doesn’t believe in flaying naughty children alive; but she is doughty rather than diffident. She once taught Mexican women in a boxcar; and she has a zealot’s faith in the wonders of progressive education. Ever since she began putting her theories into practice in the University Elementary School, the rolling, residential community of Westwood Hills, Los Angeles, Calif, has hardly known a day of peace.

The disputation has gone on for 18 years. But Miss Seeds, no mean disputer herself, also had the powerful backing of the University of California at Los Angeles. Her pupils were to learn by doing. They built model villages, fashioned Chinese pottery, model looms, mastered arithmetic by running a model grocery.

Lost in a Spelling Bee. Not everybody joined in the fun. Among those who didn’t were parents who discovered that fourth-graders could not hold their own in a spelling bee. Miss Seeds’s frame schoolhouse became more of an embattled blockhouse than an ivory tower. One parent complained that her child could not even read her grandma’s handwriting. “Who can?” retorted Miss Seeds.

Two years ago an irate parent got elected to the Los Angeles school board and soon persuaded the board to oust Miss Seeds from her city-owned buildings. But other parents rallied to Miss Seeds’s support. When left-wingers gave Miss Seeds some unsought backing, she found herself before California’s Legislative Committee on un-American Activities. Chairman Jack Tenney asked her to explain her classroom approach to Russia. Miss Seeds said that her pupils studied Russian costumes, homes and farming. “You mean collective farming?” asked Chairman Tenney. Replied Miss Seeds: “That’s all they have.” She was cleared of being “un-American.”

No Small Favor. But by now she was without a schoolhouse. Friendly parents let her teach in their homes. “It was no small favor,” said Miss Seeds. “You should have seen the bathrooms.” Her supporters went to the State Legislature, got a special grant of $300,000 for a new school. Two frame buildings were moved from a wartime airbase, tucked safely away in a rustic corner of U.C.L.A.’s campus, where Miss Seeds owes dominion not to the city but to the University.

Last month, the University Elementary School reopened with 175 pupils. There were still doubts as to whether Miss Seeds’s youngsters had learned enough spelling, arithmetic, and reading just by “doing.” The carefully neutral Westwood Hills Press decided to find out. The paper picked 81 graduates of Miss Seeds’s school and 81 kids from the regular public schools of Westwood Hills, all of them about 13, and with equal I.Q.s (about 112). Then the same tests were given to both groups. Miss Seeds’s students did as well as the others, if not better, in almost every subject—even on the non-progressives’ home grounds (reading, arithmetic). Said Miss Seeds: “It was a great victory. Besides, our children are world-minded, too.”