Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds: Progressive Women in California Education - Kathleen Weiler

One of Kathleen Weiler's research project is to explore the lives and work of two forgotten California women educators: Helen Heffernan (1896-1987) and Corinne Seeds (1889-1969). These two women were the center of a wide network of progressive women educators In California for almost forty years and were key figures in what was probably the most concerted attempt to put the ideals of progressive education into practice in a state-wide system of public education in the United States. Helen Heffernan was appointed California Commissioner of Rural Education in 1926. Influenced by Dewey and the ideas of the social reconstructionists, she came to see the rural school as a perfect setting in which to enact Deweyan ideas of pedagogy. By the late 1930s, her interests moved from rural school to the rapidly expanding urban schools of San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles as well. It was at this time that she began her close association with Corinne Seeds. Seeds, who studied with Kilpatrick and Dewey at Teachers College, was made the head of the University Elementary School, the demonstration school at UCLA, in 1926. The two had a close personal and professional relationship for over twenty years. In the late 1940s, when California was swept with anti-Communist, McCarthyite attacks on public education, both came under attack, but despite the shifting political tides, they continued to defend progressive ideals until their retirements--Seeds in 1957 and Heffernan in 1966.

The story of Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds is significant in itself. It also provides an opening to understanding the broader history of California education, raising questions of the treatment of ethnic and cultural difference, the struggle of left and right wing political groups to define public schools, and the shifting role of women as teachers and administrators.

Although this study will be organized around the lives and relationship of these two exceptional women, Kathleen Weiler will use their lives to illuminate the growth of the educational state in California, considering their lives in the context of both changing views of women and political debates about the nature of public education.