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And it’s not only superficial, there’s a lot going on under the surface. Andy Lewis has got more than one level of communication about this subject.
First there’s the level where he says things like “I have said that Steiner Free Schools are a ticking time bomb”. Gosh Andy, that’s incisive, great to see you jumping on the bandwagon and repeating something we’ve been saying since April when we released our Mr Gove’s State-Funded Anthroposophy video.
Ah, but Andy “doesn’t know” about that. We’re just parents who did have children at a Steiner School, who did have a horrible experience of the infamous unchecked bullying followed by exclusion, mobbing etc., and who did take the trouble to follow it up, with all the ensuing shit-storms.
So what do we know, right? Compared to Andy Lewis, who recently told a reporter from CSI that there were “a dozen or more” Steiner Schools in the UK whereas it takes hardly any digging to find out there are 34 (and that doesn’t count the Early Years centres). But hey, let’s not let the facts get in the way of Andy’s output.
He’s certainly not going to, and that’s why he’s been censoring any information about our initiative, from appearing on his blog, like he did back in February, which we documented here, here, here, here and here (this last link includes a video).
But more recently, even other people who try to flag up something that just doesn’t usually happen (I’m playing down the difficulty of this) ergo getting a Steiner School to accept mediation with an external agency - namely Human Rights - are finding that their comments are deleted from Andy “I publish everything without moderation” Lewis’ Quackometer. This is leaving some parents perplexed about the title of Andy’s blog post where these deletions are taking place: “What every parent needs to know about Steiner-Waldorf schools”:
Not only that, but at the exact same time as he’s deleting information, he tells the CSI interviewer that it’s “very difficult to get hard information about what happens”. Well it is if you censor it, Andy.
But he’s not censoring all of it, is he? He’s got other people writing to him, so that proves that his actions here must be to stop us taking over? Um... But how do we know how much information he’s censoring? We know he did it to us, and it’s now public knowledge because we’re vocal, just like Andy himself. Not everybody is like that.
But it’s not just blog posts. Oh no, Andy can do Steiner on more levels than that. Don’t be fooled by the cute duck exterior or his Twitter avatar. He may look as though he’s sitting pretty on the surface, but underneath the water, his little legs are working ten to the dozen, swirling up the dirt.
Here are some recent DMs that Andy sent regarding the importance of making us and our initiative disappear:
All this without offering a shred of evidence to back up his claims. Merely his word.
Here’s a question. Why is Andy Lewis, the loudest duck on the block, who loudly debunks frauds the moment he comes across them, why is he so emphatic that nobody must even mention us on threat of being blocked?
In his reply to our notice of intention to pursue Andy’s defamation, he told his followers about one of the problems: “they appear to be very angry with anyone on the web who is critical of Steiner Schools who do not make their story the centre of the discussion.”
I’m afraid sadly, that this too is defamation, because there is simply not one jot of evidence to back it up. It’s just tosh, as is every other sentence in his arrogant and silly repost. Do I think that dragging an anecdotally cultish school like Steiner to talk to Human Rights deserves a mention? Definitely. But my point (a crime in the eyes of some) in the LSN article last year was to encourage others, people like, for instance, the person who wrote on Andy’s blog recently saying that they were warned off approaching Human Rights by a Steiner School.
The fact is that we have been entirely excluded from the debate - by Andy Lewis himself. And when the evidence of that is so... blatant, it’s going to be pretty hard to convince anyone who isn’t already towing the line. In order to prove that sentence you’d have to have evidence of us being involved in the debate and trying to take it over. Oops.
And now, by the way, publicly funded Steiner Free-schools are a reality. So all the misinformation in the world that Andy can pass on to parents, or press, can’t disguise the fact that simply objecting about Steiner education on vague pseudo/ideological grounds has... well, led to that.
So it’s no wonder those little legs are swimming so hard; maybe there really is a ticking time-bomb in the dirt.
What Every Parent Should Know About Andy Lewis
Monday, 19 November 2012