Abstract
Helen Heffernan marshaled her energies and resources to support Corinne Seeds in the fight to save UES, but she also faced opportunities and dangers of her own in the immediate postwar years. In June 1945 Heffernan’s old enemy state senator John Harold Swan, who had unsuccessfully attempted to pass legislation eliminating Heffernan’s position, inserted a statement into the Senate Journal repeating his earlier accusations that the “products” of the public schools were not being adequately trained because of “those who have infected public education with the pernicious doctrines of so-called ‘progressive education.’”1 The major source of these doctrines, Swan wrote, was an individual who was “in many quarters recognized as an able, intelligent educational leader,” but who was leading in the wrong direction. Swan pronounced: “Until such leadership is changed, elementary education will be in an increasingly desperate plight.” He therefore recommended “an immediate change in the chief of the Division of Elementary Education in the State Department of Education.”2 Swan then inserted passages from Heffernan’s writings into the Senate Journal as proof of her dangerous and irresponsible ideas.3 Swan was unsuccessful in the attempt to have Heffernan fired, but she soon came to the attention of other foes.
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Notes
Helen Heffernan, “Methods in the Social Studies,” CJEE 13, no. 4 (May 1945): 244–52; HelenHeffernan, “Discussion, a Technique of Democratic Education,” CJEE 14, no. 1, (August 1945): 146–52.
Marlene Mayo, “Planning for the Education and Re-education of Defeated Japan, 1943–45,” in The Occupation of Japan: Educational and Social Reform, ed. Thomas Bunkman (MacArthur Memorial, 1982), 25–32.
John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New Press, 1999), 208.
Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan 1945–2005 (Harvard University Press, 2006), 87.
Helen Heffernan, “Building a New Democracy in Japan,” WJE 54, no. 2 (February 1948): 7.
Alice Miel, “Education’s Part in Democratizing Japan,” Teachers College Record 55, 4 (October 1953): 11.
Herbert Passin, “The Occupation—Some Reflections,” Daedalus 119, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 2.
Roy Simpson, “Postwar Progress in the Public School System,” California Schools 17, no. 11 (November 1947): 241–50.
Gilbert Gonzalez, “Segregation of Mexican Children in a Southern California City: The Legacy of Expansionism and the American Southwest,” Western Historical Quarterly 16, no. 1 (January 1985): 55–76; Richard Valencia, “The Mexican American Struggle for Equal Opportunity in Mendez v. Westminster: Helping to Pave the Way for Brown v. Board of Education,” Teachers College Record 107, no. 3 (March 2005): 389–423.
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© 2011 Kathleen Weiler
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Weiler, K. (2011). Exporting Democracy/Defending Democracy. In: Democracy and Schooling in California. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015914_8
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