We’ve been thinking about what was written in the letter from the Trust yesterday and have realised what was meant by ‘no basis under which’ we will be allowed back into the school “community”.

The reason that this grammatical mistake was made is because what he really meant to say was that there are no conditions under which we could go back.  What that means is that they have sat around and discussed this, as in, ‘what about if we let them back under this or the other condition and that a member or various members of trust, management and college, have just said, “no, I’m not having them here under any conditions”.

If it was truly a basis that was being looked for, upon which to re-instate our kids, it would be much easier to find one.  There’s justice, for a start.  If justice were the basis, then that would be solid, or fairness, or the illegality of booting the kids out with no process, warning, or appeal when you had contracted to meet with them.

Obviously, if it was a basis that was being looked for, then it would be all too easy to find one since there was actually no real basis for kicking them out. All this can be told from that simple error.  But that is understandable because the Chairman of the Trust doesn’t seem to like reading or writing very much.  He complained bitterly at having to read any length of letter and claimed that chronology was less important than his own prejudice.

The conditionality of your kids having an ongoing place at Titirangi Steiner School is very severe as many people have discovered.  You do not discover it if  a) you display no character, or b) you are part of the dynasty.  Everyone else could discover it at any time.

There are so many undisclosed conditions on being there.  They serve as a vetting system for a school that has no real testable basis for its values, and yet must preserve its dynastic structure at all costs.  Those who do not, cannot, or will not fit in with the narrow definitions decreed from on high, will ‘exclude themselves’, by becoming more and more uncomfortable, and more and more visible, at which point the school can home in on them and get rid.

I know we are supposed to be the only family that has ever been collectively expelled, but that is just semantics.  It’s ‘asking a family to leave’, like ‘asking them to a picnic’.  Presumably most families are thoroughly intimidated into slinking off as rejects well before the school gets to the point of firing them.  We must be very thick skinned, as we continued to take them at their word that they were going to work with us to eliminate the obvious bullying that was taking place and which they never questioned.

It is not hard, if you look even a little bit, to find testimony from others who have found this school intensely bullying and destructive, whatever the good points which touchingly, people still try to find notwithstanding being treated as less than human.   It is sobering to think that all those find moral people the school has produced have all thrived at the cost of whole families being scarred by the hidden and deeply conditional nature of the staff’s love and concern for the children in their care.

There was NO ATTEMPT to work with us to protect our children’s access to the school, their friends, or anything.  Really none.  The school will deny this and cite a couple of meetings with teachers... but those were about the bullying not about the way we were dealing with it.  The depth of a conditionality that will mark your card without telling you and then punish your kids viciously, is pretty fundamental.

It is more than conditional, it is the mark of desperation and despotism.  Something rotten at the core.  The same stories occurring again and again with the school always projecting its own failings outwards and never ever doing the work to change negative patterns that hurt children.             

We know it is hard to believe, and that if you have your kids at the school and it’s not happening in front of you, you’d really rather not.  Much easier to believe that we are mad people who simply have nothing better to do than spread muck about a perfectly good school.

But there are several people in the school who know full well how concerned we were about the state of our daughter, and who are well acquainted with how the story of trying to help her played out.  Those people must be feeling uneasy now, knowing how it has apparently ended, because they all spoke from a shared sense of values with our concerns.

Most of these parents expressed to us personally their own ambivalence about the way that these issues are not dealt with, and how those that bring them up can be sidelined.  There is a general awareness that the school doesn’t deal with them well.  

It must be shocking to realise that you are still part of a regime that can treat people like that.  From the outside it’s hard not to see collusion.  Is expediency intentional?  What political doctrine is it that says that a small unit of people will consent to be run as a small dictatorship?

Fear of the state school system?  Is that what makes Titirangi Steiner parents scuttle when we walk about?

We were obviously the people this would happen to, being so naive as to think that the school was being genuine and understood the policy that it had just written.  

The other day, I asked my daughter what she thought we would have done if we saw this happen to another family, knowing that they had genuinely been worried about bullying.  She said “you would have taken their side mum”.  And she’s right.  Obviously we are mad because we would actually not have anything better to do in that situation than to speak up loudly and firmly that a family had been bullied and that unless we supported them, then that bullying would have been carried out in our names. (Yuck). 

We are so mad and loony that we would not have been able to wear that and would have probably ended up in just as much trouble, running round printing leaflets and insisting that people take a stand and come out to support the family and so on.

Loony lefty values and social activism.  Bolsheviks - how very plebeian!

Here’s an interesting question though: once all the socialists, anarchists and activists, have weeded themselves out, based on undisclosed ‘conditions’ hiding behind a cloak of anthroposophy, who will be left?

That’s right.