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Maxwell Baha'i School - Welcome to the religious cult school from hell.

To start this off, I need to properly set the tone and explain a little about myself.

Here's what I am not:   Here's what I am:
1) A member of the Baha'i faith   1) A successful, married professional
2) A member of a competing religion or school.   2) A happy, well adjusted person
3) An internet Hoaxer   3) An attendee of Maxwell in it's opening year.
4) An anti-Baha'i or boarding school fanatic.

 

  4) Someone who worries more parents are sending their children to this school.
The school is named after May and William Sutherland Maxwell, early Baha'is  Apparently May & William's sense of humor is supposed to set the standard for life at Maxwell.
I attended Maxwell Baha'i school it's first year it was open for business. My parents had brought me to visit it when it was being prepared, and basically decided that I would go there. I wasn't given much choice, but it sounded kind of neat, plus it had a big lake out front so, what' the heck, right?

Here's what's being given as a typical student experience there. Here's what you actually get. A big room with four twin beds, unless you're special like me. What I got was my ass kicked repeatedly by student larger then I.  I was one of the smallest students in my group, and if I didn't want to get picked on, I had to fight the big bullies. I didn't win many confrontations, but it made the difference between being picked on every day vs. once a month.

I asked my councilors for help, and immediately assumed the status of troublemaker.  Some of my teachers would physically attacked me (shoved me into a wall,  and threw me on the ground, hit me in the stomach, and other things) when we disagreed, others would assign me disciplinary time.

Disciplinary time as Maxwell is when you are put into a guarded study hall while all the other students have a social event in the cafeteria. Guess who went to about one social in his time at Maxwell?

But, the real evil of the Maxwell Baha'i School was much, much, much worse. 

Here's the official mission statement from their web page:

"Maxwell School is a dynamic learning community committed to scholarship, to the development of spiritual ideals, to achieving excellence in moral and ethical behavior, and to the enhancement of personal character through service to humanity. Maxwell admits students of all religious, ethnic, and national origins who share these values, and provides a learning environment that helps students to think seriously about the world and their own contributions to its growth."

Maxwell's actual mission was, and probably still is, to convert all of it's impressionable students to a strict Baha'i religious mold and that excludes any individual thoughts, concerns,  or personal feeling that might come in the way.

Basically, it's a religious boot camp. You've got dawn prayers, noon prayers, dinner prayers, evening prayers. You get prayer breakfasts, prayer lunches, prayer dinners. And in between that, you get video tapes of slick Hollywood productions of Iranian Baha'i being shot. Throw that in with homicidal teachers, immature councellors, and one indifferent fat headmasters and his  bitch wife.. well, you get the picture.

Now at the time, I was a rebellious, curious, smart, musical, acne laden child. In other words, a teenager.  In time, my dislike of being mentally, verbally, and physically beaten by the school administration made me wish that I would die, rather then go through another day of Maxwell life.

Perhaps just a maladjusted kid, right? There's a troublemaker in every school, maybe I was it, right?

Wrong.

Despite how bad things were for me, they were even worse for the girls. Maxwell is a Co-Educational school, serving both boys and girls in equally humble manner. They'd tell me stories about being screamed at repeatedly, for any imagined offence. Maybe teenage girls aren't as tough as teenage boys. In any case, about the time I was being sent to the headmaster's office daily, two girls ran away in the middle of the night.

So, I and two classmates went after them. To bring them back.

We walked in a big ten mile circle, looking and calling for them, then finally gave up and headed back.

When we returned, despite the fact that I explained numerous time that we HAD NOT run-way and the obvious fact that we had returned ourselves, we were accused of running away and being a bad influence of the rest of the kids. I was expelled from the school, and returned to my home. 

I was an emotional wreck when I got home.  I felt betrayed by my parents for putting me there, and blamed myself for being expelled. Several times I came close to suicide, actually cutting my wrists, but never deeply enough to be life threatening.

By this time, my parents had become my enemy, and I spent the next ten years getting as far away from them as I could. 

I've never spoken about this before, but I hope that by putting this together on a public website, and submitting it to as many search engines as I can, that some resourceful parent will find it before they send their child through what I endured, and ultimately changed my life forever.

 

Should anyone reading this feel an urge to contact me, I can be reached at maxwell.bahai@subdimension.com.