Pioneering School Marks 50th Year

When Westland School ran into money problems upon opening in 1949, it turned to its most famous parent.

So Charlie Chaplin, eager to help get his daughter Geraldine’s school on its feet, organized a benefit screening of his popular movie “City Lights,” which attracted Gene Kelly, Groucho Marx and other Hollywood luminaries.

The effort helped ensure the survival of the West Coast’s first progressive school, which next month marks its 50th anniversary as an educational experiment in the teachings of turn-of-the-century philosopher John Dewey.

“We were definitely guinea pigs,” said Margery Seid, an original Westland student whose father, Irving Lerner, was a blacklisted editor and director. “Many of us shared the common bond of knowing our dads were blacklisted or in jail, so although the school’s approach to teaching was quite unconventional, we were in the boat together.”

Blacklisted writers Abraham Polonsky and Ring Lardner Jr. also sent their children to Westland.

“I would have exchanged places with my daughter any day and gone there,” Polonsky said last week. “The people who sent their kids to Westland were interested in the wider aspects of human experience. [The school’s] philosophy about education was so different; they embodied independence.”

The school began modestly, with only 13 students, a couple of rented rooms at a West Los Angeles temple and a staff that often went unpaid. It moved to Mulholland Drive in the late 1960s, where today the campus is surrounded by large estates and tony schools and has about 120 students, whose parents pay annual tuition of about $10,000.

“Writing often consisted of sending letters to President Truman,” recalled 56-year-old Joan Wholstetter, who along with Seid was an original Westland student. “I asked the president to save Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. We sang a lot of Pete Seeger songs and discussed the Bill of Rights.”

“Our philosophy was, ‘we’ll give you the questions, you seek the answers,’ ” said Leni Jacksen, a longtime Westland teacher who, with progressive education advocate Lory Titelman, helped launch the school. “The whole idea was that the children learn through involvement with the world around them.”

Guided by Dewey’s philosophy--which espoused a developmental, hands-on approach to learning--the parents, teachers and a child psychiatrist created a curriculum that took students outside the classroom to learn about the world firsthand.

“We wanted the kids to confront the world with all their senses,” said Ruth Hershey, former Westland director and music teacher. “If we studied a culture, we’d visit it first, then cook their foods, play their music, and paint their art.”

The founders’ philosophy remains intact: On one recent day, a group of first-graders tended chickens in a yard outside their classroom, while second-graders sawed, hammered and sanded wood for ships, part of a harbor study.

“We immerse the kids in the subject they’re studying,” said veteran sixth-grade teacher Sandy Stead.

“When I was checking out the school 20 years ago to see if I wanted to teach here, I climbed up on a table with some third-graders who were painting a mural. They didn’t even notice that I was a visitor; they were used to adults other than their teachers pitching in.”

Governed by a board composed of parents, teachers and the school director, the school encourages parents and children to voice their concerns. Problems are often resolved in town hall sessions in which the involved parties take part.

To mark its 50th anniversary, the school has a number of activities planned, including an alumni school visit and dinner on March 5 and an alumni concert March 6, at which former and current students will sing folk songs.

“Fifty years isn’t that long, really, but it’s pretty long for here,” Hershey said. “We were a poor school and we struggled. We overcame lots of hardships. But we survived on the strengths of our beliefs.”