The Battle of Westwood Hills

Abstract

The debate over the schools was muted during the Second World War, but the tension among competing visions of both politics and education was only repressed, not extinguished. One of the earliest expressions of the political struggles over education in California was the controversy that emerged in the mid-1940s over the University Elementary School, which Time magazine later called “The Battle of Westwood Hills.” Although the conflict originated in the complaints of a small number of disgruntled parents, the attack on the school and its defense soon hardened into battle lines between Los Angeles conservatives and liberals. Critics of the school raised the question of whether Seeds and her methods were not only academically suspect but political subversive as well. It was probably the most difficult and formative episode in Corinne Seeds’s career.¹