“I really can’t talk about this now”
Sheryl Mace,
Teacher and Manager of the Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School,
during the expulsions

This is just one of the ridiculous and cruel things that Sheryl, who we had always trusted up until these awful moments, said to us while she was guaranteeing trauma to our daughter.   After all, she had apparently signed off the expulsions herself!

Legally, as both a Manager and a Teacher, Sheryl’s words, her actions and inactions put her in a tricky position.  As a Manager, unlawfully expelling children, she constituted a hazard under the Health and Safety Act, a hazard which caused forseeable harm to children, and which the Trustees, as employers, should have removed.  As a teacher, failing to stick up for her charges, it could easily be argued that she as a Manager should have seen herself as a teacher as a hazard and removed herself.

Whatever her professional role, Sheryl’s pull-you push-you attitude towards our child, is clearly abusive whatever else you might call it.

It would indeed have been better if Sheryl had had a bit of a chat with herself and been a little more demanding of her conscience, instead of claiming that it was clear.  Why was her conscience clear when she was damaging children in the name of Steiner Education?  The only possible answer is that there is something more important in Steiner Education than the children.  But that wouldn’t really be efficient for a school would it.

These facts put in a different light her assertion that “I can’t talk about this now”, on the day that we discovered about the expulsions, the day when, had any school entity truly done their jobs, the bullying decision to expel the children would have been firmly over-ruled as a staunch refusal to bully families in this way, while the issues which were raised, of which there is multiple evidence, were properly dealt with.

Given the fact that one of the reasons Sean Gribben gave for why he had allowed his employee Mark Thornton to bully and unlawfully expel our three children on June 8 2009, was because Steve came to school to pick up our middle daughter, and gave our oldest child money to buy a slushy, (I kid you not), we would like to know whether Rudolf Steiner, or Anthrosophy requires that children who are given money for slushies at lunchtime should then immediately be expelled.  Maybe we’ll put out a survey of Steiner schools to find out.

"A child's faith and confidence must be awakened - not through axioms, but through human beings.”      

Rudolf Steiner

It really should go without saying that treating children this way is inhumane and certainly not in keeping with anything we have so far been able to discover about Waldorf Education.

Well we have been putting a lot of our time recently into the Private Schools side of things and it’s obvious that the stupid holes in the law are what have allowed things to progress as they have i.e. the unchecked bullying, illegal expulsions, Trustees abdicating all responsibility etc., etc.,

But as for why the bullying was so prevalent in the first place, and unchecked to begin with, at the outset, as a culture, well that’s another question which once you ask it, begs so many more.  And they’re all about Steiner.

Now we know that we’ve been accused of being anti-Steiner because of the questions we have already asked, but we can’t find anything anywhere to back that up.  We can’t find any evidence that asking questions is in any way anti-Steiner, and in the same way, Paddy Delaney, hasn’t been able come up with any evidence of us being anti-steiner to back up his accusation.  And he promised it to us ages ago.

In fact isn’t Steiner Education designed to create well-rounded human beings who can ask the right questions?  And if you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t get any answers..... 

But, hey, we really can’t talk about Steiner Education right now, because here’s an interesting survey about private schools , a once only invitation for all users of any private school service to have their say on what the new legislation should look like before the Act is passed this Spring.

Pass it on :)