The founding of the children’s school in 1945 represented the culmination of a struggle between state-sanctioned racism and faith based activism that came to a head during World War II. In February1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the forced removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans to incarceration facilities located in remote areas of several Western and Southern states.
In the face of widespread support among many Americans for such a drastic policy measure, some did speak out. Among those who did were members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an organization founded by the Quakers to support pacifists who refused to fight in World War I. Japanese American Pam Tajima Praeger, who studied and taught at Pacific Oaks and recently endowed the Setsuko Tajima Student Success Fund, is from a family with historic ties to Pasadena. Praeger’s uncle, Rev. Donald Toriumi, and her grandfather, Rev. Kengo Tajima, were both community leaders.
One of the actions AFSC took on behalf of the detainees was to publish the book “The Sunday Before,” a collection of the last sermons given by Japanese American pastors to their congregations on the eve of their deportations. Rev. Toriumi’s sermon was titled “The Tie That Binds.” In it, he urges his congregation, “Even though we may be separated from each other, let us keep this tie of Union Church.”
Rev. Tajima’s sermon was titled “New Pilgrims” and drew parallels to similar events from the Old Testament. In closing, he wrote, “Now we have to fight, nation against nation, but really we are fighting our common enemy—war. … And the only effectual fight we can put up against war now, is love.”
According to the first issue of Pacific Oaks’ school newsletter, published in January 1946, a group of families who called themselves Pacific Ackworth Associates had for years pooled their resources and planned to set in motion a Quaker center and community education program. This intention was steeped in the traditions of pacifism and social justice. One of the children’s school founders, Edwin Sanders, had served a year in prison for his refusal to serve, and another, Clarence Yarrow, spent the war directing a Civilian Public Service camp for conscientious objectors.
The land that would be the Pacific Oaks Children’s School that Pacific Ackworth Associates bought from Whittier College was under covenant, which meant that no persons of color could reside there. Moreover, the wartime prohibition against hiring Japanese Americans was still in effect. The children’s school founders were aware of these restrictions when they hired Taka Kawatsu Nomura, a Japanese American teacher, as one of the school’s first teachers, and Praeger’s mother, Setsuko Frances Itow Tajima, who was hired shortly afterward. The school’s first newsletter describes diverse representation among its students and staff:
“The nursery school parents group is homogeneous from the standpoint of cultural background, though different in many other aspects. All of Pasadena’s minority groups are represented in the school. This applies to staff as well as to parents and children. Half a dozen families with special needs for their children are being given special types of assistance.”
Before WWII, families like the Tajimas and the Nomuras had to maintain their own credit system because the banks serving white communities would not lend to them, and they could only use the public pool on International Day, after which the water was drained before white residents returned. While Pam Praeger, born in 1947, experienced a more typical California childhood, she remembers her father, Ted Tajima, aspired to be a journalist but could not get hired due to persistent discrimination. He instead became a high school journalism teacher.
During the political turmoil of the 1960s, Praeger was attending Pomona College but took a break from the ivory tower after her junior year. “The evolution of social justice was somewhat natural,” she says. She joined the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), working in the South on anti-poverty programs, before returning to Pasadena where she studied early human development and education at Pacific Oaks College and took classes with Louise Derman-Sparks and Betty Jones. Also as part of her studies, she worked in the children’s school where her mother and Taka Nomura had taught. By 1965, the seemingly radical notion of a school curriculum based on inclusion and social justice had become a nationally recognized model for early childhood education.
The opening of Pacific Oaks Children’s School took years of planning and determination and reflected a commitment to equality and Quaker values, including—as stated in the first school newsletter—that “fundamental faith and belief is best expressed in a quality of living and type of action.”
The result is a school where educators can advance innovative theories such as play-based teaching, emergent curricula, and anti-bias education, approaches that have become standards in the field.
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