Dutch author criticizes Steiner schools

This video from Britain says about itself:

BBC Newsnight – Full Programme on Steiner Schools, Racism and Bullying

This is the full programme, including the debate after the report, shown on BBC Newsnight on the 31st of July 2014.

From the BBC: “They’ve been popular for decades among the more liberal and bohemian – or some would say wacky – middle classes. Sandra Bullock and Robin van Persie are both former students. But Newsnight has learned that complaints were made to the Department for Education – that in some of these privately funded schools teachers said they thought bullying was part of how kids “worked out their karma” – and in one school, there were problems with racism linked directly to the Steiner philosophy. But since the government received these complaints, it agreed to fund three new Steiner free schools. Chris Cook has the story.”

Our analysis of what was discussed can be found here.

Saskia Noort is a well-known Dutch author.

In a 13 July 2019 column in Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad, she wrote (translated):

It seems so beautiful, children jumping over fire or water with flower wreaths in their hair, singing hand in hand, in a meadow surrounded by happy parents. Who does not want that for their own offspring, in these times of tough performance pressure, stressed teachers and increasingly cutting back on physical education and creative subjects. …

In my old village Bergen (North Holland province) the SUVs are arranged in rows at the Adriaan Roland Holst [Steiner] School to bring the unvaccinated offspring. “Steiner school children have special parents”, Tommy Wieringa once said, and that’s right. More specifically, white parents. The pupils have “less often a non-Western migration background,” the Volkskrant daily writes euphemistically. The fact is that the Dutch word neger

in English, somewhere between ‘negro’ and ‘nigger’

was used for a long time at the Steiner schools: “Negroes [Neger] are in the development phase of a child between 0 and 7”, says Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy. My niece, with a black father, was not allowed into the family cradle by my anthroposophical aunt 25 years ago, because “if a pregnant woman encounters too many black people, her child might also get negroid characteristics.” …

Steiner schools are not only critical of ‘race mixing’, but also of vaccination.

In the Netherlands, the most prominent anti-vaxxers are on the one hand, anthroposophists; on the other hand, Christian right fundamentalist Calvinist protestants.

In my old village, the vaccination rate is remarkably low. Only 86.7 percent of children under 2 were vaccinated and that is far below the national average of 93 percent. Steiner believes that children’s diseases are not necessarily bad, and even help with their development. Anthroposophical youth doctor Rineke Boerwinkel claims that anthroposophical parents “simply ask more questions”. “These people are used to thinking for themselves.”

From the anthroposophical perspective on the development of children, namely that a soul reincarnates and slowly descends when the child is born. A childhood illness could help to compensate for karmic deficits from a previous life. “Overcoming childhood diseases can contribute to the development of the child.”

I thought I would like to touch on these two things before all those special, thoughtful pro-diversity parents think that they are bringing their child to a left-wing bubble school. The only other place where people during the solstice jumped over a fire was in the garden of the widow Rost van Tonningen.

Dutch neo-nazi activist. Widow of the second deputy leader of the Dutch nazi party during the 1940-1945 German nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Just think about that, with your daisies in your hair.

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