Freeminds
Bitter defrocked apostate
I had a wander over to the Department for Education website, to have a look at the league tables they publish, detailing the quality (or not) of instruction given at Greenfields School.
Greenfields School is an Applied Scholastics institution; the only one in the UK (AFAIK). It's located in East Grinstead, and exists to serve the needs of Scientology cultists, to whom East Grinstead is something of a Mecca, because of Stain Hill Manor.
The 'Study Tech' was created by LRH, and is based on a tradition of academic under-achievement that he started himself. But let's see what the government figures show, rather than the usual Scientology promotional material. (Raw data available here.)
First up, Greenfields is unusual in that it caters for children from 3-19. Most UK schools have a far narrower age range, requiring that children move on between distinct nursery, primary and secondary schools. But Greenfields will keep your kids in the only Applied Scholastics game in town... for anything up to sixteen years.
Next oddity... there are just one hundred pupils.
Scientology is, as we all know, expanding like never before. Straight up, vertical growth, just like that little guy on the soap box said. Right? Well, um... no. Despite this part of the UK being the cult hotbed (the Stain Hill Manor effect means that fully half of the UK's Scientology victims live in or near East Grinstead), there's just 100 children at the only Scientology school. (Scientology, millions of members in the UK? My arse.)
It's normal practice to split classes up, by year (age) but if this were done with Greenfields' 100 pupils, there'd be just six and a quarter in any given year. If you offer them options (German, History or Metalwork?) you'd have class groups so small that they'd vanish.
Moving on to look at the quality of education that a child can expect to get at the cult school, we see that for 2011, the key stat of "Percentage achieving 5+ A*-C GCSEs (or equivalent) including English and maths GCSEs" ... was 41%. By comparison, the pupils of the nearby Comprehensive school, Imberhorne Lane scored 70% in this stat. Their young people are quite simply better prepared to get jobs, or go on to study at university.
(When considering this, bear in mind that a Comprehensive school is generally nothing special. They don't get to pick and choose their pupils; it's just the place that anybody who lives in the catchment area can send their children. Snobbish people might say that comprehensives are something of a 'safety net', and don't perform as well as academies, technology colleges, faith schools and so on.)
Imberhorne Lane has 1,687 pupils registered, despite the narrower age range of 11-18. Clearly, Greenfields School - with just 100 pupils - is failing. The best news is that everybody knows it, and even some of the clams are sending their children elsewhere.
Seems to me that whenever you see the words "Hubbard" and "education", the word "fail" can't be far behind.
Let's not talk about the Greenfields teacher who got jailed for sex offenses in 1994 (OK, go on then, if you must...) It's the kids I feel sorry for. No wonder they end up being drafted into the Sea Org, after more than a decade of Hubbardian garbage presented as 'education'.
I'll end with a classic Scientology arrogance and fuckup story: Greenfields originally opened in Hammerwood in 1981... but it did so without planning permission, and the school was forced to move sites by the local authority.
Make it go right. Um.
Does anybody on ESMB have stories of their time at Greenfields they'd like to share?
Greenfields School is an Applied Scholastics institution; the only one in the UK (AFAIK). It's located in East Grinstead, and exists to serve the needs of Scientology cultists, to whom East Grinstead is something of a Mecca, because of Stain Hill Manor.
The 'Study Tech' was created by LRH, and is based on a tradition of academic under-achievement that he started himself. But let's see what the government figures show, rather than the usual Scientology promotional material. (Raw data available here.)
First up, Greenfields is unusual in that it caters for children from 3-19. Most UK schools have a far narrower age range, requiring that children move on between distinct nursery, primary and secondary schools. But Greenfields will keep your kids in the only Applied Scholastics game in town... for anything up to sixteen years.
Next oddity... there are just one hundred pupils.
Scientology is, as we all know, expanding like never before. Straight up, vertical growth, just like that little guy on the soap box said. Right? Well, um... no. Despite this part of the UK being the cult hotbed (the Stain Hill Manor effect means that fully half of the UK's Scientology victims live in or near East Grinstead), there's just 100 children at the only Scientology school. (Scientology, millions of members in the UK? My arse.)
It's normal practice to split classes up, by year (age) but if this were done with Greenfields' 100 pupils, there'd be just six and a quarter in any given year. If you offer them options (German, History or Metalwork?) you'd have class groups so small that they'd vanish.
Moving on to look at the quality of education that a child can expect to get at the cult school, we see that for 2011, the key stat of "Percentage achieving 5+ A*-C GCSEs (or equivalent) including English and maths GCSEs" ... was 41%. By comparison, the pupils of the nearby Comprehensive school, Imberhorne Lane scored 70% in this stat. Their young people are quite simply better prepared to get jobs, or go on to study at university.
(When considering this, bear in mind that a Comprehensive school is generally nothing special. They don't get to pick and choose their pupils; it's just the place that anybody who lives in the catchment area can send their children. Snobbish people might say that comprehensives are something of a 'safety net', and don't perform as well as academies, technology colleges, faith schools and so on.)
Imberhorne Lane has 1,687 pupils registered, despite the narrower age range of 11-18. Clearly, Greenfields School - with just 100 pupils - is failing. The best news is that everybody knows it, and even some of the clams are sending their children elsewhere.
Seems to me that whenever you see the words "Hubbard" and "education", the word "fail" can't be far behind.
Let's not talk about the Greenfields teacher who got jailed for sex offenses in 1994 (OK, go on then, if you must...) It's the kids I feel sorry for. No wonder they end up being drafted into the Sea Org, after more than a decade of Hubbardian garbage presented as 'education'.
I'll end with a classic Scientology arrogance and fuckup story: Greenfields originally opened in Hammerwood in 1981... but it did so without planning permission, and the school was forced to move sites by the local authority.
Make it go right. Um.
Does anybody on ESMB have stories of their time at Greenfields they'd like to share?