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August 21, 2005
Lying by omission (or how to misuse ellipsis)
Here is a wonderful example of how PLANS (with malice) distorts a quote. This excerpt from a talk is available on the PLANS website. The poster inserted 4 ellipses. As you can see by my inserts in brackets, these ellipses represent substantial amounts of missing content, a total of 730 words snipped. Although this is certainly not correct usage * this blatant chopping is not, by any means, the worst bit. What makes the entire thing totally outrageous is that the entire talk by Eugene Schwartz is posted on the PLANS site. Two minutes of effort would have provided a link to the complete content, making it possible for the reader to experience the unsnipped remarks for him/herself. Nope. Unless the site browser is smart enough to realize that the editing has changed the meaning and smart enough to try to track down the actual talk, this bit of blatant deception will go undetected. No one can possibly claim that this sort of “editing” happens by accident. Nor can it be claimed that the meaning of the material is not changed by quoting a few carefully selected words and leaving out 730.
You can read Mr. Schwartz’ complete talk here:
http://southerncrossreview.org/41/schwartz.htm
There are some further distortions in the frame added by the poster. Although it is perfectly true that Schwartz is no longer the director of teacher training at Sunbridge College, the underlying thrust is that his frank speaking pushed him to the fringes of the waldorf movement in the U.S. His biography and C.V. are available here:
http://www.millennialchild.com/bio.htm
Note that his books continue to be published by SteinerBooks, he has been continuously employed as a Waldorf teacher and he works as a consultant, working with 20+ Waldorf schools every year. This doesn’t seem to be a movement that can’t handle frank speaking.
Mr. Schwartz said, near the end of his talk: “Let's leave the quoting and back-quoting and citation and finding new obscure manuscripts ...”
PLANS is as much in the habit of quoting (well, mostly misquoting) as they were six years ago. There just seem to be some folks who get stuck and can’t move forward. Eugene Schwartz isn’t one of them. By and large, the teachers and administrators and parents who make up the Waldorf movement aren’t stuck either. But the folks who created the PLANS site and who post on the WC are, with a few exceptions, the quintessence of stuck. They are the malevolent lunatic fringe of the Waldorf education movement.
2. Waldorf Is Based on Occult TheoryOn rare occasions a leader in the Waldorf movement has called for full disclosure to parents concerning the Anthroposophic basis of the schools. Eugene Schwartz, a respected Waldorf master teacher and former director of teacher training at Sunbridge College in Spring Valley, New York, says, in a lecture at Sunbridge, November 13, 1999, regarding his own daughter's experience in Waldorf: "I'm glad my daughter gets to speak about God every morning: that's why I send her to a Waldorf school [175 words]. . . I send my daughter to a Waldorf school so that she can have a religious experience . . . [127 words] when we deny that Waldorf schools are giving children religious experiences, we are denying the [whole] basis of Waldorf education . . .[417 words] The time has come for us to stop pussyfooting around [theories] that will sound too strange if we tell parents what we are really doing. . . Tell everybody what we are about. The day they walk into the school, let them know [actual wording: Stop pussyfooting around. Tell everybody what we are about. The day they walk into the school, let them know then.]...[11 words]it is our responsibility to share with the parents those elements of Anthroposophy which will help them understand their children and fathom the mysterious ways in which we work. Yes, we are giving the children a version of Anthroposophy in the classroom; whether we mean to or not, it's there." Schwartz was replaced as director of teacher training at Sunbridge shortly after making these public remarks. Perhaps other Waldorf leaders are not ready for this level of openness.
*Ellipsis indicate an that part of a quotation has been omitted. Be certain that the omission does not change the sense of the excerpt. If the part of the passage following the ellipsis begins mid-sentence, capitalize the first word and place it in brackets.
Four ellipses alone on a line Indicate that an omitted portion of the text is a paragraph or more. David Toomey - 481 Bartlett Hall - Department of English - University of Massachusetts - Amherst MA 01003)
Posted by Deborah at August 21, 2005 12:46 PM