Schoolyard Critics

This post is a footnote to my review of Eugene Schwartz' short movie "Recessitation: Bullying in the Waldorf School", which inverts both joke mechanisms and definitions of play and bullying to ridicule the notion of both.

I've reviewed the movie on ANM, because it provides a lot of useful (if inverted) information about Steiner education, and this addendum examines how, in their own critiques of this movie the Steiner critics have continued and extended the inversions used by Schwartz, by which actions they reveal not only a singular lack of ability to self-scrutinise, but also a dangerous lack of awareness of the similarity of their position to the one that they are criticising.

Handy Template for Identifying a Cult

Of use to cult-busters might be this handy template, helpfully supplied by Alicia Hamberg. It originally concerned the treatment of Gregoire Perra, whose whistleblowing activities the 'critiques' talk about increasingly, by the Fédération des Ecoles Steiner en France, who are suing him.


But what I found when I looked at it (once I stopped laughing), was that it can apply to any group that mounts an aggressive attack on people with different opinions or ways of approaching matters, and which, in doing so, begins to approximate cultish behaviour.

Intimidation

When I'd published my post on Tuesday, I read it again, and although it was a relief to laugh at some of those things, about how Charlie Kingston went to the police about a six year old's play date, I realised that I had been less than honest in one important respect.

It's all very well being funny and all that, and making light of a bad situation. Finding the humour in things can literally keep you alive I've discovered, as someone living with chronic pain, and it's a habit that I've developed on and off-stage. Humour is quite simply the antidote to all life's ills.

PTSD and Bullying

When I left University I joined local Theatre in Education company Theatre Alibi, and toured around Devon with a show called "No Heroes No Cowards", about a soldier in the First World War, shot for desertion.  That was in the 80s but it took until 2008 for soldiers shot for "desertion" in WW1 were given a full pardon in recognition of the fact that they were, in fact, suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Even once there was an understanding that traumatic events can effect people in this way, the term PTSD was still used exclusively to refer to a single traumatising event evoking “intense fear, helplessness, or horror”, and which continues to cause distress, flashbacks and other symptoms.

Anthroposophical Plants

There's something wonderful about plants grown with the full force of life-affirming quackery running through them, they look the same, maybe a bit posher, but they taste like something can taste only when is has been thoroughly steeped in esoteric dogma.

But until now Anthroposophical Plants haven’t been flagged up as much of a problem.