Steiner Critic Alicia Hamberg has written a post announcing her intention to delete some older posts from her blog. Some of these relate to us and our situation with the Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School, from a time when her and other critics were sympathetic to our experience.

Alicia describes the deletions of material relating to us as “a special case”.

We are reposting those here to maintain the record that Ms Hamberg herself, and the other critics, were perfectly civil to and about us, quite excited about our direct approach, and even admiring, and this continued until Melanie Byng needed to protect herself from any consequence of her own thoughtless actions, at which point, and following Alicia and Diana’s initial mobbing, they began to smear and defame us loudly, which position has continued thus far.

It would obviously be better for Alicia if these posts did disappear, given the clue they provide that something clearly happened to change that original positive attitude; something that is not explicit to any application of logic anywhere among critics writing, but after which we have become their whipping boy on several hideous occasions.  

There have been many vague attempts to pin this change on us, eg that we once asked her if she’d consider putting up some posters, that she refused and that somehow, perhaps, we got in a huff about it, that our reconstructed interviews (about a cult) were akin to “interviewing actors”, and Alicia also cited what the school and a parent said to the press (and which they’ve just publicly contradicted in the joint signed statements).

as “evidence” of us being thugs and bullies.

Without this record of those troublesome favorable posts it would be so much easier for this astoundingly cultish group of people known as Waldorf or Steiner critics, to promote the falsity that nothing at all happened but that they “have always been at war with Eastasia”.

It would also be easy for the critics to claim that links we’ve already made to this material, which we will now obviously have to reroot, were faked somehow.  

It appears impossible for them to understand that real people can really address real issues in real Steiner schools and get a real result like this.

Who knows why that’s so difficult for them? But such an efficient approach to Steiner problems certainly appears to be beyond the people presenting themselves as the critical group, and who have systematically completely excluded us from any part of their, self-promoting “main” debate, on the basis that they ‘suspect’ that we wish to take over all of it.

It’s not a great leap to imagine that this kind of hierarchical nonsense among critics could explain a lot about the state of Steiner education today.

Alicia’s post grudgingly concedes that:

“I’ve heard that the couple recently managed to get the Titirangi school to pay them some money, and I hope this means things have settled down, and the circus has ended. I had feared that the school was going to pay and perhaps it was rational to do so, given the circumstances”.

The circumstances being that the Tribunal Director had warned them that failure to come to the table could very easily lead them to the Human Rights Tribunal, so it probably was “rational” of the school to finally come clean, but Alicia’s stingy lie by omission to her readers is in the fact of the statements agreed mutually by us and the school, which bear out everything we’ve said about the situation all along, and completely vindicate us from all the school’s smears against us - smears which Alicia eagerly picked up, reframed and trumpeted for herself, cheered on by her loyal group of critical thinkers.  And of course she’s not about to delete any of that!

So she’s certainly not going to share with her loyal readership the fact that the school has admitted, in significant detail, that it got it wrong, because that would point to the fact of her totally prejudicial summary judgment of people she admits she’s actually had very little to do with.

Whatever little fires Ms Hamberg wishes to start, the evidence shows that it is her own mendacious antics that best describe the state of the circus.

1• 17th of November 2009: “steiner school new zealand” [link]

2• 5th of November 2010: “new website rudolf steiner federation messenger” [link]

3• 30th of November 2010: “tainted spiritual legacy of dogmatic zealots (what else?)” [link]

4• 25th of February 2011: “an education movement that doesn’t encourage questions” [link]