Education: Pasadena Revisited

On the afternoon of Nov. 21, 1950, a harassed and weary man turned to address the hushed audience that jammed the meeting of the Pasadena, Calif, school board. Superintendent of Schools Willard Goslin announced that after less than 2½ years in office he was resigning. “I shall take away no ill feelings when I leave Pasadena,” said he, “rather a deep regret that I was unable to lead this community to a level which would have produced the best school system in America.” With those words, Willard Goslin brought to an end one of the bitterest school battles the U.S. had seen in years (TIME, Nov. 27 et seq.).

But to many U.S. educators, the battle is still far from resolved and far from being just a local affair. It has echoed its way across the nation, because it seems to involve all the confused and arbitrary pressures that plague public schoolmen everywhere. This week, in a fast-paced little book called This Happened in Pasadena (Macmillan; $2.50) David Hulburd, onetime chief of TIME’S news bureaus, gives a dramatic, behind-the-scenes report of those pressures and how they grew.

“Vote NO!” Willard Goslin came to Pasadena in 1948, an able man who had served as superintendent in Minneapolis and had recently been elected president of the American Association of School Administrators. Pasadena was proud to have him, and at first the school board approved everything he did. Willard Goslin had a year to settle himself into his job before he began to hear disturbing news. In the winter of 1949, a small group of citizens began attacking the schools at a series of meetings held in the American Legion Hall. Most of them thought their children were not doing well enough at school, and charged that Superintendent Goslin was not putting enough emphasis on the three Rs. But soon other charges began to creep into the arguments. Some of the group objected to Goslin because he was for federal aid to education though he had made it amply clear that he did not mean federal control. Others accused him of favoring “modern pragmatic education”—a slogan they made up but never bothered to explain. Still others objected to him simply because 77-year-old William Heard Kilpatrick, famed leftist advocate of progressive education, had been asked to speak at a small summer workshop for teachers.

Pooling their vague and various grievances, the protesting citizens formed an anti-Goslin School Development Council, and as the weeks passed they gathered strong support from outside. When Goslin and the school board suggested rezoning the school attendance boundaries for two new schools, property owners howled in protest because it meant they would no longer be able to cross over zone boundaries to pick the best (i.e., allwhite) schools.When Goslin and the school board tried to raise the tax levy limit from $.90 to $1.35, the protests grew louder still. “Progressive Education Means Progressive Taxation!” cried the council. Echoed the Property Owners Division of the Realty Board: “Vote NO on the School Tax Increase. Watch Your Pocketbook!”

Delinquency & Communism. Pasadena did vote no, but the council was not through with Goslin yet. It demanded a full “ideological investigation” of the entire school system, hinted that the school program was “part of a campaign to ‘sell’ our children on the collapse of our way of life.” The council’s Chairman Frank Wells used the writings of rabble-rousing Allen Zoll, onetime advocate of Father Coughlin, to back up his charge that progressive education fosters juvenile delinquency. Wells’s successor, Osteopath Ernest Brower, was convinced that sex education (a pre-Goslin innovation) would lead straight to free love, which would lead straight to Communism.

In the face of these snowballing attacks, the school board began to weaken in its support of Superintendent Goslin. Finally, while he was in Manhattan to attend a national school meeting, it sent him a telegram asking him to resign. With that, the pro-Goslin forces sprang into action, but it was too late. The board insisted that Goslin must go. “He didn’t have the right rapproach,” explained one member. “That’s the word, ‘rapproach’ to the grassroots problem.”

Whether Goslin’s “rapproach” was wrong or right, Author Hulburd is sure of one thing. The campaign that forced his resignation was a sorry example of the sort of attack that hurls irresponsible charges without denning terms, or even finding out whether the charges are true or not. The result is that the attack not only damages the schools, but debases the honest criticisms of thoughtful citizens as well. Concludes Author Hulburd: “What . . . happened in Pasadena could easily happen in other cities where modern educational systems [come] under attack.”