Just wanted to call out these two quotes from your link:
1. "Another time a sixth grader asked me how the copy machine in the office worked. Before I could even open my mouth, a teacher ran over to the child, and told him that there was a gnome asleep in the box and that when you pushed the button, a light went on, woke him up, and then he quickly copied the paper placed in front of him and pushed the copy out of the little hole. After the child left,
I was told that we couldn’t “poison” the child’s mind with “stone cold facts”."2. "Another thing that bothered me deeply was the fact that although the teachers believed that everything from the color crayon a child used at a certain age, to the knowledge that they were exposed to, had to be completely controlled, they could be left utterly alone on the playground. It was explained to me that this was because “The angels watched over and protected them” while they were playing. This dichotomy bothered me. I couldn’t fathom why it was so incredibly important to make sure a child was painting with a certain color at a certain time, but could be left completely unsupervised on the playground. Once, when a child was in tears because the other children kept on pushing her off of a stump they were playing on, I tried to teach conflict resolution skills to the group and was, once again, admonished by the staff. I was told that all of the children were “working through” things and needed to be left alone. -
Eventually the bullying got so bad that it permeated every part of the child’s school day. Yet still the teachers would not intervene. The child became sullen and withdrawn, stopped working, stopped playing, stopped talking,…. The parents tried to speak with the teachers about the situation, but were treated worse than I was. Eventually she was removed from the school and the bullies found another victim to torture without any adult intervention."
