STEINER WALDORF SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS

[theantignome]

hi everyone, i wanted to start a new thread with a NEW topic heading here, as the active one at the moment with over 700 posts looks like it is all about the Cambridge school. This may confuse newcomers.

Let's continue the debate here !
All newcomers welcome !

I will shortly link our two previous threads on MN for any one new to have a look at.

Davy, could you also give a link to your new yahoo list here please ? Thanks.

That's very nice, Sune, but it's not what I asked for. You have about 15 quotes on your web site that have no source provided - in at least one case, you misleadingly link to "an interview" with the person, implying the quote is in the interview, but it's not - the quote is not in the interview. You have been silent every time I have asked for the source of the quotes.

Can't you do it?

You say I am libeling you because I refer to your antics on wikipedia?

Hon - think it through before you accuse someone of libel. You have called me a terrorist, member of a hate group, and member of a group that is like "Jew Watch," and you say that I have libeled you?

Have you no small sense of irony here?

Please provide the source of the quotes, and give up thinking you can intimidate me with the word "libel."

Get a lawyer if you think I've libeled you.

And if you can't provide the source of the quotes, then that right there makes you a liar, because you have posted these quotes on your web site, implying they are real quotes, yet there is really no reason to believe that, if you have no idea where you got them. You are making false statements - misrepresentations. By publishing them, readers are given to assume they are true in a documentable way. I'm starting to have to conclude that you know they are not.

That's called lying.

Or if it isn't a lie, then it's not a problem to post the original source information for the quotes. Right?

It doesn't look good that you don't even answer this simple and reasonable request from readers of your web sites, but just ignore it and call the person a terrorist.

Just to be clear, the links above - with the exception of the TeachersCount site - are not independent sources. They're anthroposophical web sites. I'm asking for sources of the quotes that are from independent sources, not Waldorf advertisements. We all know these quotes are pasted all over Waldorf web sites. It is clear that no one really knows where they originally came from. It's called false advertising. Or lying.

Phoenixshytes - I have tried to shake off the things you said to me yesterday and I can't. They were so vicious and personal that I am left wondering whether you know or know of me in RL - the Steiner world is not so big, after all.

If you do, please would you tell me here so that I can change my MN name. This site is important to me and I would not wish to feel my posts were being read by someone who knows me and has shown such vitriol towards me and my family.

Thank you.

Janni - I want to let you know that I think Pheonix was unfair in the extreme with the comments made. I doubt very much that s/he has identified you - I certainly haven't (not that I've tried).

Despite making different choices to you and being happy with the school dd is at, I feel for you and can see how hard your decision has been, and how bad your experience was.

FWIW I think you did the right thing in leaving graciously and I agree entirely with your saying that your dc need to be able to trust the decisions you make for them. Making a scene in front of them and their friends would have been a ridiculous and unfair way to handle things.

I genuinely wish you and your dc all the best with the new school.

Thank you, StripeyMama, I appreciate that x

I am prety horrified at how things get on these threads which is why I've given up on contributing.

Personal attacks on posters are unjustified, and are no way to make a point. It only makes the attacker look a total twat and detracts from any argument they are trying to make.

Really sorry that you were on the recieving end of that, it makes me quite cross that the only posters trying to defend Steiner are apparently capable of little more than that sort of personal abuse.

Diana, you have loosely and sweepingly written on me here at Mumsnet among other things, without substantiating it:

"He's been caught a number of times in lies and ruses that he thought he'd get away with becuase the English-speaking critics wouldn't even know about it or be able to read it"

and continued to write:

"The incidents I'm referring to come from your antics on various sites in wikipedia - where you played things quite differently on different-language sites, assuming that the same people weren't able to read both sites."

Your publication of the statements here at MN makes MN responsible for publishing libel if you do not substantiate them.

Your following manipulative demand that I publish the specific sources of all quotes found here before you imply, but do not state, that you will(?) substantiate your libelous statement is a pure children's game.

With regard to the description of the small anti-Waldorf fringe group in SF/CA that you support, on whose board you have been as far as I remember, and on whose mailing list you write intensely on basically a daily basis, as a "hate type of group", this is substantiated by a number of myths, described here, that it has published over appr. the last decade and continues to publish up to this day at its site as "Education of the Public about Waldorf education".

Good Sune - then go find an administrator and ask them to remove my posts, scare them that somebody will sue them for "libel" or whatever.

Meanwhile what's the source of the quotes?

Diana:

"Good Sune - then go find an administrator and ask them to remove my posts, scare them that somebody will sue them for "libel" or whatever."

They are your postings. Why not ask MN to delete them, if you can't substantiate them?

"Meanwhile what's the source of the quotes?"

I'll work on it.

Huh? I'm not asking MN to delete anything. That is not my style, as I think you know.

Last December, on anthroposophy-tomorrow, a yahoo mailing list, I asked, actually begged and pleaded, with the moderators of the list to remove some extraordinarily vicious, practically pornographically violent and sick, anti-Semitic rantings that an anthroposophist copied and pasted from an extreme far-right racist web site. Stuff about Jewish politicians raping children in hotel rooms.

That's the only time I've ever asked anyone, ever, to please remove something from an online source - I felt it was the equivalent of shouting Fire in a public place, it was inciting violence, a call to racists and sickos to take action, that it was worth censorship - it shouldn't be there, it should come down and not be viewable in public. I don't care to "smear" anthroposophists, I'd like to see them clean up their act and censor people like that without needing someone like me to suggest it. (For my troubles I was removed from that mailing list - you're right. They removed me but not the person who posted about Jewish politicians raping children.)

Generally, however, other than such a really extreme, horrifying circumstance, I'm not in favor of censorship. I never do what you do - try to score points by manipulating people behind the scenes, trying to have viewpoints I don't like stifled, trying to have people who disagree with me removed from discussions or slapped on the wrists by finding petty rules they have violted, or try to intimidate people into not posting something by making empty legal threats.

So no, I don't have any interest in doing things like you do - going to MN administrators and saying, "Stop this person posting, because someone might sue you." I consider that technique cowardly and reprehensible.

I repeat: you go ahead and sue me, or you go and waste your afternoon trying to get a response from the administrators of various web sites, trying to see if you can get somebody nervous by whispering "law suit." That is not my style.

And when you're done with it, it looks like you still won't have posted sources for the quotes on your own web site.

Surprise me and prove me wrong: "work on it."

Anthroposophical Anti-Semitism:

This sort of material is why anthroposophists need to harass their critics - to keep some ugly things that are tolerated in their own movement from wide public discussion, on a place such as Mumsnet where people are mainly concerned for their children's welfare, on this board specifically schooling.

Here's the discussion I was taking part in (it was January, not December, sorry).

groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy_tomorrow/message/36310

Scroll down to the link from the "smokingmirrors" web site. The guy who posted the link is a widely admired anthroposophist who is a major participant in Internet anthroposophical circles. He used to be a Waldorf teacher.

The piece he quotes is a sickening stew of Holocaust denial:

"detailed forensic investigation of Treblinka has irrefutably shown that there were NO mass graves there."

• standard conspiracy theories that blame the Jews for all world ills:

"It's hard to imagine that a company from a certain country was controlling security at all of the 9/11 airports, the London tube and the Madrid train station and that members of their security forces were caught video-taping the 9/11 attacks and dancing around and one wonders? one wonders indeed how they knew about this in advance."

Jews are described as:

"the source of most of the evil that plagues humanity at this time."

Finally:

"These are the people that did 9/11. These are the people who are running the killing fields of the moment. These are the ones who have revised history to their own purposes, who silence dissent, who fire university professors, who control the medium of the massage, who rape the children and who place the children in the hotel rooms for the politicians to fuck and who videotape it and then murder the children afterwards and who then control the politicians. These are the shits who control the banks and the arms industries and who are marching you as these words are written toward the grayscale destiny of your final hours."

I repeat - for my trouble protesting this, and suggesting that the moderators remove it, I was removed from the discussion. The poster of the above hate speech was not removed. (I was removed on a technicality involving "complaining about list moderation.)

This is why people like Sune Nordwall go to such lengths to claim that critics are a "hate group." It is a classic cult reversal.

Diana:

"This sort of material is why anthroposophists need to harass their critics - to keep some ugly things that are tolerated in their own movement from wide public discussion, ..."

You mean in contrast to the material published by the small "waldorf-critics" hate type of group that you support 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?

Here, I've been trying to help you get started, Sune. Just to refresh your memory, this is the page I am referring to from your web site:

www.waldorfanswers.org/WaldorfComments.htm

There are 30 quotes there, from famous people saying nice things about Steiner education.

Exactly two (2) of them are sourced. The Diana Kerry quote gives a 2004 German newspaper article as a source. I've never thought it was a particularly useful quote for Steiner schools, she just says she "learnt German quickly" there - you know she'd have learned German quickly in any German school you put her in, as little kids will. She says nothing else about the school - the "time in Berlin" that "set the course for her life" doesn't seem to refer to the school, but is, not surprisingly, out of context. But I guess at least she didn't have a bad time at the school. Does either she or her brother send their own kids to Steiner schools?

The quote from Eric Utne also appears to be kosher - I didn't scour the article, but the link called "Waldorf teacher" is really to a piece in the Utne Reader in which he praises Waldorf education. I'd love to hear how Eric Utne is doing these days in his post-Utne Waldorf career.

Not a single other quote is properly or even improperly sourced. Under the quote from Joseph Weizenbaum, we see "An interview with Prof. Weizenbaum," cunningly placed to suggest this is the source of this quote. Click on the link: the quote is not in that interview.

Even the Ken Chenault quote isn't sourced, and I do believe you have a source for that, so you could improve your web site by including proper source information for at least that one. Considering it is the first one on the page, think how much better and more believable the page would look?

The quote from Thomas Armstrong provides a link giving the title of his book. This too appears to be placed as to suggest the quote is from that book. Maybe it is - but the link just goes to a page advertising the book. It doesn't quote a page from the book.

The link under Saul Bellow's quote goes to a page showing he won a Nobel prize. It doesn't show the reader where it was he made a statement about Waldorf schools. This too I bet you could find - wasn't it in newspaper articles about him when he died?

Or the Ken Wilber quote, which says after his name: "Author (among many works: 'Integral Psychology'): this isn't scholarly, Sune. It implies the quote is from a book called "Integral Psychology." Is it, Sune? What page is that quote on?

Overall, the list of quotes is crafted entirely misleadingly, and I'd call it nothing less than propaganda. It's a great case study in the power of the Internet to mislead. The page is colorful and all and gives dozens of links - about 0.1% of them to relevant information.

Or if you have any of the facts at your disposal, Sune, face it, I'm doing you a favor if I help you to upgrade the presentation a little. It can only help your case to post FACTS on your web sites; you should thank me for asking you to please improve the quality and accuracy of the page. Let's see if you are interested in this challenge. I have been asking you for weeks and been ignored until this morning.

Take Marjorie Spock's quote - I have no doubt she really said this, and that the quote is probably in the book you mention. But the link you give just goes to an advertisement for her book. You can do better than that. It should go to the quote itself if it is available online. Failing that, give an actual source on your page: Title, publisher, city, year, page number on which the quote is found.

Yeah: Peter Staudenmaier's a "forger" and "fake historical scholar" . . . and you? Did you forge any of these documents Sune?

"You mean in contrast to the material published by the small "waldorf-critics" hate type of group that you support 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?"

Oh, I can't even believe I clicked these links. After all this time, you'd think I'd know better. I actually clicked them thinking they were to things PLANS had published! They're to your own web sites!

And just to clarify, yes I mean "in contrast to things published by PLANS." I find nothing PLANS has ever published to contain anti-Semitic material, especially not of the stomach-twisting nature of "Jews planned 9/11" "there were no mass graves at Treblink" or "Jews rape children and leave them in hotel rooms for politicians to fuck." Nice try putting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 links up, hoping people will think if they click them maybe there's something disgusting there ????

You see what he does, he knows after anti-Semitic anthroposophical rants have been exposed, he needs to post many links in a row to quickly distract from it. The point is to quickly move that material further up the thread to a less readable place.

Sune, you're more stupid than I could've ever thought. I don't care what Chenault says. We've all seen your Chenault quotes littering the place.

It doesn't matter!! Waldorf school isn't one bit better because Chenault went there - no matter what Chenault says. It's ridiculous and irrelevant to bring that up again and again.

My personal view is that you really deserve the label liar. But let's put it like this: what you write is filled with lies. Your deeds speak of lies. If that makes you a liar, you judge that for yourself. I'm sure you can come up with the right answer.

Janni I've re-read what you did, and that's not even a mild hypocrisy. It's just a very healthy way of handling a difficult situation, especially when your kids were involved. It's absolutely an offence to sound reason to call that hypocrisy.

I wonder how many lies one could find in the above mentioned 1-2-3-4-5 quotes on Sune's web sites... The number of lies would probably surpass the number of lies Diana and I have made during our whole lives...

There's no way that Sune can "prove" there's a "hate group" unless he makes it up.

Some of the pages quoted from by Zzoey seem to be

On Waldorf schools and "People for legal and nonsectarian schools" (PLANS) and

On the stories by Peter Staudenmaier.

Oh, sure Sune, they're all your work. I'm not going to take credit for them. All the glory falls on you.

And, just as a side note to Zzoey:

I know you, like Diana, love me: Why else would you take such a deep interest in everything I write, quote it extensively, point out all my weaknesses, educate me, and try make me into a better person ... ;-)))?

No, you see "Eva", that's likely a lost cause, as education would be a waste on you.

Have you reformed at all in the past 10 years? I hardly think so.

However, when you post on a web site such as this, it's not exactly right to let your BS get by unqestioned. Some other fruitcake might actually fall for your fruitcakeiness - though, I must admit, that's pretty unlikely to happen very often.