Four Years On
It's four years since The Steinermentary Project was launched on the 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s birth.
Our own direct experience of Steiner education, as it was happening, had seemed like an isolated and isolating event: the actions of a "rogue" Steiner school. It was only when Steiner critics found our online account of what had happened that they vigorously impressed upon us that this acceptance of collateral damage to children and families was a well known characteristic of Steiner: “there is nothing in your story that I haven't heard many times before from parents of children at Steiner schools. [...] The one big difference is that you have documented it so well.” (Margaret Sachs)
In response to that knowledge, we set up this site, and since then we've heard many accounts from others of the same kind of collateral damage, to children, entire families, and even neighbours, many of them featured on this site.
And the question has to be asked: is this type of collateral damage truly acceptable when offering what is purported to be a kinder, gentler, alternative education? Or ever?
To that end, and as 2015 marks the 90th anniversary of Steiner’s death, we thought it timely to create a new version of our launch poster which, by including some of the experiences we’ve gathered, better reflects the international scale of the problem (photos of the printing process can be seen at the end of this article).
Standing up to any victimising scenario is beyond difficult, and it can all too easily lead to shunning, vilification, and isolation, and yet because people keep doing it, social awareness of these difficulties is growing daily. For those interested in what can happen after whistleblowing, we recommend this thorough recent article by Andrew Smith.
In it, Dr Philip Zimbardo, conductor of the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, talks about his recently launched organisation, the Heroic Imagination Project, and his belief that the skills needed to whistleblow can be both taught and learned: “for me, whistleblowers are people who are simply more attuned to a situation, who are able to step back, even when they've been closely involved in things and go ‘Oh my God, this is wrong. How can I stand up or speak out to try and change it?’”
These co-incidentally happen to be the very same skills and questions appearing in discourse and research on the effects of bystander behaviour on school bullying.
Each quote relates to a specific article (from left to right):
Threatened Family Leaves School
Lies, Damned Lies, and Steiner Education
The Anthroposophical Indoctrination of Students in Steiner-Waldorf Schools
