Emma’s girl Gaia* I was forced out of private school -- by classmates who called me a green hippy
*Named after the Greek goddess of the Earth
WHEN Emma Thompson took her teenage daughter out of an elite school to teach her at home, she claimed it was because formal education amounted to a ‘sausage factory’.
But now 15-year-old Gaia has revealed that one of the reasons she left the school was because of jibes from schoolmates who taunted her for being a ‘hippy’.
The teenager says she received the comments from fellow pupils at the £6,235-a-term Highgate School in North London when she started campaigning against climate change, following in her actress mother’s footsteps.
Gaia – named after the Greek goddess who personifies the Earth’s spirit – took up the cause after travelling on a Greenpeace expedition to the Arctic Circle with her mother last year. She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘When I came back, I got a lot of people telling me to stop being such a hippy.’
She added she had been deemed ‘sad’ by people her age for choosing to hand out flyers about climate change on her weekends.
‘I tried to get people to listen,’ she said. ‘It’s ridiculous how many teenagers on their phones call you a hippy for being interested in this. You get proper stick for it. There were many reasons why I left, but that was one of them.’
Ms Thompson and her husband of 12 years, fellow actor Greg Wise, took Gaia out of school earlier this year. Since then she been working towards her GCSE exams with private tutors in a specially- constructed classroom in the garden of their £3.5million family home in nearby West Hampstead.
Last weekend Gaia and her mother joined fellow Greenpeace protesters outside the Shell headquarters on London’s South Bank to protest against drilling in the Arctic.
Gaia said: ‘I’m really trying to get my generation involved in everything. I just love doing this on a weekend. Some people think it’s really sad, but I go and talk to people and I love it.’
She said that visiting the Smeerenburg glacier in the Arctic Ocean last August ‘really brought everything home to me, when I went and saw this place that is potentially going to be destroyed. Then I started trying to get my generation involved because we’re the ones that are going to be in trouble’.
The revelation about why Gaia left school comes after Ms Thompson declared she would happily open the doors of her home to take in a migrant, following Sir Bob Geldof’s pledge to take four refugee families into his properties in Kent and Battersea, South London.
The 56-year-old actress told this newspaper that taking a refugee would be a natural choice after she and her husband adopted their son Tindyebwa Agaba in 2003. He was a teenager who fled the Rwandan genocide and had been sleeping rough in London.
Ms Thompson said: ‘My son is a refugee, I would absolutely take one into my house. We all have to carry our bit of the piece. People are having such a terrible, terrible time – I’ve never known the world to be in such a desperate state.
‘After the Second World War, we took thousands and thousands of people and wee didn’t think twicee about it. In factt we regarded them m as heroes.
‘There’s a great deal of racism towards these people, I’m sorry to say it but it’s true. Bring those people over it and give them a nice cup of tea and help them.’
When the couple took Gaia out of school earlier this year, Mr Wise e said: ‘She loves learning and she’s terribly focused and hard-working, but she didn’t like the sausage factory of formal education. I’ve no argument with that.’
A spokesman for the school said: ‘Highgate invests a great deal in its pastoral care and we always want to learn from any child’s experience.
‘We take our pupils’ welfare very seriously indeed.’