STEINER WALDORF SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS

[theantignome]

hi everyone, i wanted to start a new thread with a NEW topic heading here, as the active one at the moment with over 700 posts looks like it is all about the Cambridge school. This may confuse newcomers.

Let's continue the debate here !
All newcomers welcome !

I will shortly link our two previous threads on MN for any one new to have a look at.

Davy, could you also give a link to your new yahoo list here please ? Thanks.

Zooey

and as we know, clairvoyance is far from perfect. Bad phone line to the spiritual world. Perhaps the ahrimanic computer interferes with the transmission, and we know Sune sits at the computer quite a lot.

I'm waiting eagerly for the 6-cent-story and the revelation of the wiki-truth!

My clairvoyancy* tells me there will be stuff not favourable for Sune's position!!

*my magical insights into the hidden realms of truth!

I thought it was quite a good story.
When my daughter left Steiner - they posted her .. a... wait for it... HALF KNITTED pink... PIG!
Yes!
With voodoo instructions about how to sacrifice finish it.

It was gruesome.

But nothing would surprise me- i wouldn't be atall surprise if the teacher put the stamps on the letter, and then with an evil anthroposophical little spiritual half-smile, thought "This could have esoteric meaning- if you were esoteric enough. And if you weren't, you could just pretend you don't know what anyone's talking about, because you're so swet and spiritual and have a singy songy voice and werar soft floeing garbs, like an angel....."

But Sune makes a web page about it? [hmn]

A half knitted pig!!?? The reality of waldorf is like evil comedy.

You don't happen to have a picture of the half knitted pig, by any chance? It would make the whole story less surreal to get to actually see the pig

Rudolf Steiner on PIGS:

"Here we must say to ourselves: As much as possible of cosmic substance must be carried, as it were, into a sack. Oh, the pigs, the fat pigs and sows ? what heavenly creatures they are! In their fat body ? insofar as it is not nerves-and-senses system ? they have nothing but cosmic substance. It is not earthly, it is cosmic substance. The pigs only need the material food they eat, to distribute throughout their body this infinite fulness of cosmic substance which they must absorb from all quarters. The pig must feed, so as to be able to distribute the substance which it draws in from the Cosmos. It must have the necessary forces for the distribution of this cosmic substance."

Pretty bad to get a symbolic half heavenly creature! Half the cosmmic substance!

Half knitted cosmic substance

Well I'm not sure where it is. my 7 yr old's face was a picture - we left quite fast- before they could write ceremonious leaving plays about our children being too dark skinned to play in the garden with the blond princes and princesess....

When the parcel arrived, my youngest daughter was so excited, none of us had an idea of what it was- her face fell an absolute mile!

Particularly since they forced her to knit right handed, when she's left handed.

And the pink! It was so bright!

Zooey- didn't you knit a pig at 7?

My middle daughter knitted a gnome maid after her pig; a maid? What?

And thn a fl pink elephant. i suppose grey is too close to black in the spiritual realm of colours. Pink must be more spiritual. Steiner said it was like skin tone didn't he? EERRR- not EVERYONE'S skin tone actually.

Maybe that's why the pig was such a bright pink-they didn't have a darker more cafe au lait colour for our kids.....

Gosh- this thread is nearly a thousand.
We'll have to start a new one soon.

Yes he really threatened to punch him. Of course he then stated that he was really way too spiritual to ever do this, it was just a passing fantasy LOL.

I thought I'd better go and look this up and post the link before he gets in there messing around with it and removing it. Here it is, with the exact quote below the link:

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Thebee&diff=prev&oldid=83823836

Su ne wrote to Pete Karaiskos, a Waldorf dad whose three children have been absolutely abysmally treated in a very well-known, old and venerable Waldorf school in the US:

"A minute ago, not now any more, but a minute ago, when I read you latest insult, it made me think: At some time, I'll punch you somewhere for your endless row of personal attacks and insults if we meet. And I'm a peaceful man. The last time I fought with someone was when I - once - in school fought with someone in grade nine. And I'm a Conscientious objector. Just to give some perspective on it. Thebee 20:42, 22 October 2006 (UTC)"

This actually strikes me as very funny, it's fairly typical of anthroposophical psychology. They imagine they're way too spiritual to live in the world the rest of us live in, so they don't have to behave according to the standards the rest of us do. So, it's okay to threaten to punch someone - everyone following that?

"I'm waiting eagerly for the 6-cent-story and the revelation of the wiki-truth!"

Zooey, from rummaging around in critics archives I don't find it. It was before my time. I find Dan mentioning it in May of 2000 and saying it happened "a couple of years ago" but I can't find anything from then. He could have been misremembering the time frame. Or maybe it was reported to him privately or on the phone. Debra's post sounds like she knew of the incident personally and that the parents were right to be concerned. She says the stamps were "no accident."

Sune posts at one point that the number 6 is a symbol of harmony and maybe the teacher covered the package with six-cent stamps to send good wishes to the family. Not impossible, but also somewhat odd. How about sending a card that says "Best wishes" like an ordinary human might do?

I, too, think the family was right to be concerned. That doesn't mean the Waldorf teacher really was trying to put satanic symbols on the package, that seems unlikely to me, as anthroposophy and satanism are not the same thing and have no real connection. I have never known an anthroposophist who was into satanism, and think it is very unusual if it ever happens. But absolutely parents are right to be concerned when their child leaves a school due to mistreatment and later receives an unusual package in the mail. I am not sure but it sounded as if there was no word of explanation in the package, and that would add to the strange and worrisome effect created.

Most often, the explanation for strange, socially "off" things Steiner teachers do is not evil or malevolence but simply dishevelement, disorganization, and cluelessness about the real world, failure to understand how their actions will affect people, or poor interpersonal skills. (Ahem - kind of like someone we know here?) Not great qualities in a teacher - and doing something slightly wacko like sending a mysteriously wrapped package to a newly departed, disgruntled family strikes me as straight out of the Waldorf "How to Alienate Families" handbook. Maybe there's a special section on how to completely freak out a family that has already left unhappy

Oh gosh Diana- classic!

How wonderful- this anthroposophist Sune threatening to punch someone for personal attacks! HA HA

So Don't you like personal attacks then Sune?
Ever heard of transference?

Yes Diana- think I just about get that not

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Thebee&diff=prev&oldid=83823836

"But nothing would surprise me- i wouldn't be atall surprise if the teacher put the stamps on the letter, and then with an evil anthroposophical little spiritual half-smile, thought "This could have esoteric meaning- if you were esoteric enough."

Symbols don't have to be "evil" or have a negative content to freak somebody out. These people make even nice symbols freaky just because they act so freaky themselves. They had my kid actually afraid of angels.
Angels . . . They were always blahhing on about angels and he developed some really negative associations with angels. If they had sent us a package with angels all over it after we left I can tell you we would not have appreciated it, and would have viewed it as hostile.

"evil comedy" I like this phrase, it sounds like it was invented as a Waldorf genre.

The half-knitted pig is quite funny.

It's easy to picture that these things arriving in the mail afterward seem chilling.

I have a couple of old bags in the back of the closet with half-finished old Waldorfy toys, and they definitely give me a shudder if I peer into it. Yeah, they're angels and dolls and fairies and other totally harmless symbolism . . .

One reason they're freaky is they're often faceless, another little Steiner oddity.

zooey thanks so much for the pig quote, the pig with its extra cosmic substance, that's interesting new info to me. there is always a reason and practically everything is symbolic, don't let thebee tell you otherwise. now I know why waldorf children knit pigs, I didn't know that before.

No pigs were knitted. At 6, last year of kindergarten, my grandmother had to knit a sock, though. It was to be used as a horse head, on which I was supposed to attach the ears - I made them bright pink on one side and bright yellow on the other - and make the hairs (also pink and yellow, naturally ). I took so long to finish, I got detention. In kindergarten!! But there was no knitting, because we brought the sock from home.

In 1st or 2nd grade I knitted (or crocheted, I don't remember) a sheep. It took for ever, too.It was probably 2nd grade, and 1st grade was knitting a gnome.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Thebee&diff=prev&oldid=83823836

I don't know why, it works for me?

If this doesn't work, it's on his "User talk" page at wikipedia dated 22 October 2006. He calls himself Thebee. The link is to an old version of the page, and I didn't check its latest version but I'm sure he's removed it or archived it - he is famous for very swift and efficient archiving of things that make him or Steiner look bad - but if you look at the history of the page using that date, you would definitely find it. That's one nice thing about wikipedia . . . it's possible to hide things, but unless you get an administrator to do it, the evidence is always there to be uncovered if someone knows where to look.

Thanks Northern.

Yep, the famous videotape of the Advent Spiral.

PLANS is suing two school districts in California claiming that Waldorf/Steiner schools violate the separation of church and state because they are religious schools.

The ceremony was taped as evidence of its religious nature. Anyone who has attended the Advent Spiral ceremony at a Steiner school knows that it is a religious ceremony. It's a beautiful ceremony, btw.

Not so beautiful ceremony when you have to participate in it though. Candles dripping on your hands hurt. (Sure, spiritual, but not comfortable.)

It's definately religious. The whole reverence and solemnity and whatever. Like eurythmy, actually spooky in a way.

It's a pity I threw all my waldorf stuff in the garbage. Otherwise I would've been posting gnome and sheep pics, and probably every other ugly thing I produced in school.