Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Waldorf Schools

God this is embarrassing.
You see, I do believe in science, for example including the science that shows that antibiotic and pesticide residue in foodstuffs can be harmful, and the science that has proven that only biodynamic products are consistently and reliably free because biodynamic farmers believe in the harmfulness of antibiotics and pesticides even more strongly than I do.
So should it matter to me that they are also convinced that burying ground quartz in cow horns in their potato fields will Harvest cosmic forces I their potatoes? My need for intellectual honesty says yes. (My husband refuses to endorse astrology by buying Demeter products and complains when I do so).
However, unlike, say, the potential of a teachers convictions on past lives and temperaments to negatively affect their students, I do not think the ground quartz in a cow horn has the potential to negatively affect the potato.

I helps to remember that agriculture is based on genetic engineering.

That's why, when you try to return to the authentic cow, the primal cow, the original natural cow, well, the result is...fascinating.

Behold.

The rebirth of the Nazi cow!

Fortified with natural master race Aryan primal vitality from a time before agriculture!

"This particular breed dates back to the 1920s, when German zoologists and brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, recruited by the Nazis, began a program to resurrect extinct wild species by cross-breeding various domestic descendants — an effort typically referred to as “back breeding.” Among their success stories was the half-ton Heck cattle, a reasonable facsimile of the hearty and Herculean auroch cattle that dated back some 2 million years prior and has roamed en masse all over Germany centuries prior."

"Is anyone really surprised that the cows turned out to be murderously dangerous?"

“The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could. They would try to kill anyone. Dealing with that was not fun at all. They are by far and away the most aggressive animals I have ever worked with,”

http://modernfarmer.com/2015/01/nazi-era-cattle-breed-just-awful-expected/

Ach! But the sausages they say, were exceedingly tasty,,,

You know what, I do believe we are beginning to stray off topic. One thing at least the OP will not have to worry about is the mad nazi cow.

Mostly, this thread is setting off giggles over here...I'm just going to contribute the minor footnote that multiple personality is more properly called dissociative identity disorder:

http://www.dissociative-identity-disorder.org/DSM-5.html

I have an image of the Steiner phlegmatic as a catatonic Augustus Gloop sort who responds in monosyllables and needs to be spoken to loudly and s-l-o-w-l-y. His teacher sits him by the window and, as she prattles on to the class about gnomes, he cantilevers his limbless torso body over his desk in an exhausted act of desperation, his mouth engulfing a whole contraband cupcake lazily in one bite. He then returns his focus to a squirrel outside the window, silently willing his brain cells to replicate on each other the act he only just committed against his dessert.

Wouldn't that be the physical body expressing itself through cupcake consumption? And if so, doesn't that make this a melancholic sort of type?? Oh dear.



And what exactly are the cupcakes and their frosting made from, if not from sugary, fatty goodness?

Oh, I see. The cupcake shouldn't have been there. Contraband. There's a word that I know the meaning of.


I tend to think of the Phlegmatic person as more of-- well, more of a Gaston-type (from Disney's Beauty and the Beast). Perhaps that is wrong, though. Maybe he's actually Choleric instead.

You would've had gnomes too, from the looks of the Steiner says page.
For some reason the 'read in full context' wasn't working, but I don't see how it could explain that. And a quick google search revealed it does apparently relate to a toy-type object, either a sort of malevolent elf-on-the-self or a benevolent spiritual plaything.

The whole phlegmatic/choleric/etc. nonsense was lifted entirely from Galen of Pergamon, who applied Hippocrates' notion of the four humors in medicine to variations of personality and behavior. So, if it looks like we're looking at educational advice from the kind of people who would prescribe bloodletting for the flu, that's because we are.

Just so that there is no confusion here, Dude does not mean to assert that bloodletting is *not* a very appropriate treatment for certain medical conditions, such as hemochromatosis

He is simply clarifying that bloodletting is *not* an appropriate treatment for viral conditions and should not be used as an educational tool.