A Good Fit

The phrase "not a good fit" actually means
 "we expect collateral damage".

A reader of the Stroud News and Journal has asked for my opinion of the building of a new Steiner School for 600 pupils under the free-school scheme.  I wasn't sure my detailed answer would fit into a comment sized chunk I've written my response here.




My opinion is informed by my experience and research.  Due to having addressed infamous issues within one Steiner school, we have received many letters and communications from other parents both from that school and from others all over the world, whose experience echoes and in many cases directly replicates the authoritarian, controlling and openly victimising behaviour we witnessed.  I'm not talking simply about bullying among children, which can and obviously does take place everywhere, but about what happens when it does occur as my experiences have taught me that you really don't know what sort of relationship you really have with anybody until something goes wrong.

So an important question for me was how come that so many people who've never been near a Steiner school have the impression that it's a kinder, gentler alternative when there are so many gruesome stories out there and in my in-tray?

And the answer is a disconnect.  The advertising and what actually goes on often have very little to do with one another for reasons that are distinctly Steiner, where children and their families who feature in the gruesome stories are described as "not a good fit" a wonderful phrase which actually indicates very clearly how far this system will go to bury bad news, which I obviously have experience of personally as well.

Of course lots of elements of any school simply come down to the people there and how they manage things and this phrase, "not a good fit" is very useful to dismiss the shocking evidence of abuses within the global Waldorf brand.

What the phrase "not a good fit" actually describes is an acceptance of collateral damage.

The great thing about having so much spiritual science fluffing about the place is that it makes it marvellously easy to move all the goal posts. The Stroud school says that everybody interprets Anthroposophy differently, which makes it sound wonderfully free-flowing but the fact that Anthroposophy is there at all (which it has to be for the school to call itself a Steiner school) means in practise that things can easily change on a six-pence to "we have to do this because of Anthroposophy".

This doublespeak permeates all levels of Steiner from kindy to any discussion of Anthroposophy with those at the Goetheanum.

The Stroud school's website says, for example "Our school will be part of the ongoing global development of Steiner education, valuing its roots in Steiner’s work but moving forwards without dogma, in a spirit of love, curiosity and freedom."  This sounds great doesn't it.

The Steiner school our children attended describes itself as a "safe, peaceful, natural learning haven", yet we discovered the local community was literally littered with families who had been bullied out of it over decades for continuing to object to their children being used as punchbags.

In fact eventually, following the success of our Human Rights action, and entirely due to the publicity it generated, a pervasive longstanding rumour was quantified when a mother came forward and told us the real story of her child who had suffered a fractured skull at the school many years previously, which the school had pretended was an accident.  Yes, you did read that correctly, a child suffered a broken skull from a deliberate assault which the school pretended was an accident.  It was actually years before the child even told the parent what actually happened. This mother has allowed us to include her story which was made public for the first time this July in my presentation "Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire" - Confirmation Bias in Online Groups" at the International Conference of Cultic Studies, "Manipulation, Abuse and Maltreatment in Groups" in Trieste.

This story, and the fact of families being dislocated, fragmented and even divided one from another is sadly not unusual in the communications that we have observed and received personally. This is the sad reality of the seemingly benign phrase "not a good fit".

Apart from the obvious question of "why isn't an education that describes itself as uniquely child-centred "a good fit" for all children?", why can't Stroud Steiner just steer clear of all that nasty stuff?.  Well that's a nice idea.  Prof David Mollet in California is probably the person most practically informed as to how easy it actually is to keep some of Steiner's potentially progressive ideas about children's education, as he's tried to develop a whole curriculum designed to do just that - a task he began after being targeted by another Steiner School, which tried to get him deported because he refused employment there, something he describes as the "worst experience of my life".

Oddly enough Jo Sawfoot also experienced the "reporting to social services" tactic, prior to her successful tribunal action against the Norwich Steiner Initiative.  It's another element which surfaces worryingly often in the awful accounts of mobbing by and within these communities, worldwide.

The irony of schools "telling" on parents, or teachers who won't toe the authoritarian line, is not lost on us, who had to spend three years effectively justifying our own legal and moral duty to look after the welfare of our own children, which involved proving that the school wasn't following it's own procedures, which are that children should "tell" about bullying.  They actually expelled all our children because one of them followed that procedure.

So for all the fine words, we're looking at a system which has some of the best advertising, and yet is plagued by some of the worst anecdotal accounts of vicitmising behaviour and authoritarian control which do also follow observable patterns.  The "not a good fit" doublespeak translated in our case as "wouldn't simply allow their child to be used as a punch bag for that gang of boys", and we are certainly not alone there.

Regardless of rhetoric about starting with Steiner and moving on in freedom, there are certain tenets, described as "guidelines" of Steiner that any school has to follow to be in the brand.  One of them is this: "pedagogical methods are used to deal with discipline".  What does that mean, exactly?  What are the pedagogical methods used in this regard? Nobody will officially say, although the word karma is too often whispered.

But the evidence we've seen personally and what others have provided certainly points to a definite preference for doing nothing to prevent children bullying one another, and we were told by teachers in the school that it would be damaging to a bully to separate them, and that lots of bullying children "turned out ok", with no mention of the outcomes for their targets, trying to negotiate their lives with their self-esteem in tatters, after a childhood spent hiding in bushes, sometimes wetting themselves through fear of going to the toilets, and watching the adults around them cosset young bullyers.

Even the Woods Report (p 36) made reference to an earlier study (Golden 1997) as finding that "on the basis of classroom observations, the male, and male hierarchy, appear as the norm in stories (op. cit.: 4, 6), and, on the basis of interviews with children, stories are interpreted in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes."

One day, during the period at the Titirangi school when we were having the doublespeak experience of "let's keep talking about the bullying", whist absolutely nothing was done, I was talking to a mother who was telling me of her own troubles within the controlling and authoritarian power relations in the school - and even though I'd began personally to experience a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality, I felt ice go up my spine when she suddenly said "they will be watching us now, standing here talking".

So what?  Can't the Stroud school escape these cultish overtones?  The advertising of course states that teachers all interpret Anthroposophy differently, but does that actually solve the problem or create more?

Another study of Waldorf by Dr Marguerite Wilson in 2005, titled ("It's Not a Democracy": Adult Power, priviledge and the normalization of One Developmental Epistemology in a Waldorf Daycare", which was recently highlighted on Waldorf Critics by Peter Staudenmaier, magnificently describes part of the problem which she describes as Waldorf teachers in a daycare setting using "their interpretation of Waldorf epistemology to "soften", and justify their unequal power relationship with the children".

Dr Wilson attributes the inequality in these relationships to arise from a lack of examination of deeply embedded cultural assumptions. Her abstract goes on:

"This lack of examination of power and cultural assumptions is facilitated by the historical location of Waldorf exclusively within privileged communities. I argue, furthermore, that the vision of childhood that Waldorf education tries to "protect"; is based on Romanticized adult-centered ideas of children's nature and development that are far removed from children's lived experience."

This sums up what I think of Waldorf education.  In a nutshell, it's a bit of a fetish for rich white folks. In this case, that is combined with a controversial and again potentially white middle-class priviledge enforcing policy of giving power to that class of parents on the State, a recipe for even more damaging disconnect from a right-wing Government that functions like an occult old boys club itself.

Given the great British prediliction for cliquishness, the potential for ugly mobbing behaviours down the line is fairly high in my opinion.  As I said, I am aware of shocking facts which I'm not at liberty to share, but which would have weighed heavily on the introduction of State funded Steiner.

By now there are far more and better ways to describe any progressive nuggets of wisdom from Rudolf Steiner, that allow children space to grow at their own speed.  It's not really news anymore.  For goodness sake, we've even had several waves of feminism by now as well so there's really no excuse for schools being patriarchal in the least.

There is just no need to have anything in education which impinges on a strong committment to democracy in theory and practise and anything at all that gets in the way of these needs to be chucked into the dustbin.  Basing all your educational theory and practise on the system of one man who was a self-proclaimed mystic to boot, should qualify.

In fact, the whole spiritual edifice, being further obfuscated by the circular power relations between management, teachers and trusts, within Steiner, is a handy moveable feast that can equally be used to apparently invite democratic involvement, largely in the form of real and hard work from parents, and also to shut them out, when their need for democratic engagement doesn't fit with the ancient dogmatic cant.

The wide acceptance of collateral damage implicit in the phrase "not a good fit", which sadly even the critics have fallen for, is not even a near relation of open democracy and it appalls me that people are not noticing that but are more concerned with what now clearly emerges as the fetish of pre-occupation with Rudolf Steiner, both from the movement itself, and from the critics, whose treatment of actual reporting families has veered into sectarianism as a result.

But Stroud Steiner will be above all of that won't it?  And so the merry-go-round starts up again with a merry tune. The extensive lobbying done in this area through connections between Emma Cragie, the Rees-Mogg family and Michael Gove seem to have resulted in tax-payer funded Steiner ed, and now potentially a big new school in Stroud.  To me this merely demonstrates that those supremely dynastic power relations that lead to chilling experiences like the one I had when that mother said "They will be watching us now", are alive and well and coming to a town near you soonish.

To put it bluntly, the fetishistic adherence to ancient patriarchal, racially damaging and anti-democratic notions make Steiner a perfect environment for sociopaths to rise to the top and start playing their machivellian games - with damaging and long-term effects to real children.  And this does explain the disconnect between the advertising and the bad news cover-ups as well - because isn't that patriarchy all over!

My informed concern, and the reason I'm bothering to write this, is that by the time there might be evidence of any such cover-up at Frome or Stroud or any other British Steiner free-school, that will mean it's already too late for some hapless families - collateral damage to bury while the State-funded advertising material is lovingly polished till it gleams.


Further links:

Video:  Mr Gove's State Funded Anthroposophy

From Eoin Clarke: 10 evidence based reasons why Michael Gove's FreeSchools should be opposed.