Kiwi Teacher fired over Shakespearean Play.

Suzette Martin, herself a Christian, has been dismissed from her teaching role at Keikeri’s Westmount school in July 2009 after giving her year 13 class a modern version of Shakespeare’s immortal play ‘King Lear’ she down-loaded from the internet to cut costs.

Westmount is a faith-based school which adheres to the insular and cult-like principals of the Exclusive Brethren Church. Every year New Zealand tax-payers fund 15 Westmount schools to the tune of 2.6 million dollars which goes to subsidise just 1620 enrolled students. Only Brethren children are permitted to enrol and the church bans it's members attending University or seeking similar higher education.

To rub salt into Martin’s wound, her complaint to The Employment Relations Authority for unjustified-dismissal, has just been rejected.

The ERA sided with the cults trustees, that teaching 17 year old teenagers the works of ‘the bard of Avon’ was inappropriate given the Brethrens closeted and narrow-minded indoctrination.
The schools protocols allowed only material that “reflected Bible values” like mass-murder, incest, talking snakes etc and rejected outright the secular-evils contained in one of the greatest master-works of the English language.

The term the school committee used to describe King Lear in Martins 'don't come Monday' letter was "corrupting and morally defiling".

Martin was deemed to be in the wrong by not running the play past the schools trustees for their approval – despite the fact it formed part of the national English curriculum and her requests for the school to fund the authorised version of the play were turned down by the very ‘powers that be’ at the same school that fired her!

Once again we get to see the true-essence of faith-based education in this country exposed in all its glory: state-approved bigoted brain-washing of innocent minds.