School create an epistemological order among children. They primarily modify a child’s focus and behavior like factories manufacturing and assembling components on a linear particular conveyor in an assembly line.
They reduce entropy (disorder) and organize particular forms of order (value) among children in the name of learning patterns and language. They teach children particular methods of doing things like counting, describing and above all remembering.
But Nature is full of autonomous learning among the young, entropy or disorder in order, chaos among likeness, destruction in the process of creation and generation of life from decomposition of living cells. The sun’s gravitational field created multiple forms of life on Earth and the Earth’s gravitational field opposed that to create our atmosphere and oceanosphere.
What we learn from quantum physics is that learning itself is archaeological, be it human history or natural/cosmological phenomena.
The world and our understanding of it is granular and not continuous and in sameness, what we impose on the world, our categories are tinted by our everyday particular experience.
Learning happens in disorder, entropy, difference and error and not in order, rigour, sameness, and ritual.
Languages developed not in schools and universities but in the chaotic exchanges in human community and from filiation from mother to daughter and sister languages keeping to phonological roots like Proto-Indo-European. The process continues even in this age of linguistic identity poltics.
The lexical coda of languages and their development show the treasure trove of learning that languages are and they don’t exist in labelled containers like Latin or Kannada or Bengali.
For example the words nau and navis for a hollow object in like a stomach or boat are present in Latin, Kannada and Bengali. The word for sailor is navita in Latin and navik in Kannada and Bengali.
Languages flourish in temporal and semantic filiation but they also exist because of various differences and disorder. The human brain and tongue are the fascinating producers of language.
See this page for a comparative list of basic words in modern languages for an illustrative vocabulary of linguistic filiation and the encoding the history of the cognitive practise called learning.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo-European_nouns
Languages are histories of ourselves, narratives about ourselves and our past, loans from our memories to make sense of living the anticipation of our future.
The archaeology of our knowledge tells us about knowledge based on our experience of everything around us that influences our ideas, our familiarity about who we are and what we consume. Languages are genealogies of our ways of learning and remembering.
Waste and pollution are the outcomes of our ways of imposing durability and immortality on our material possessions that we attach value to and what we consume and materials we do not recycle or reuse.
But Nature’s order is one of destruction in the process of creation and generation of life from decomposition of living cells. Events that are eternal in their regularity but granular, different and temporal in their occurrence.
The ontology (our understanding of the existence) of materials in nature is an event and that things that seem eternal are also temporal events in their existence on a cosmological timescale.
The perfect example is that of stone in nature and the artificial attempt at mockery of stone – concrete. Nothing is eternal and infinite but just granular and finite.
Darwin foretold the future in the science of survival, extinction, and evolution but he didn’t know that his own species would seal it’s own fate through the economics of industrialization and were not instinctively moral like he believed…
Adam Smith anticipated this crisis in the ethics of value in his moral exhortations about human behavior in the theory of moral sentiments but I wonder if he applied Darwin’s theory to the ethics of self-interest in the wealth of nations?
The hydrocarbon fuelled civilization is headed inexorably on the road to autotelic extinction. No longer treasuring the autonomous nature of human cognition and behaviour but chained to the factory produced notion of value.
And thereby hangs the tale of value in our material morals in an industrial world. Waste is something that we no longer value or have no use for. Waste is the other in our consciousness, not the same as our wants. The term waste in industry is used for downstream material, nobody wants to buy or has any use for and put in landfills.
The real “value” of wealth is in the giving like plants “give” fruit that is “food” and regenerates once again into trees eternally. Value is not ordered or particular in economics and languages but more the disorder, chaos like the din of a market place or blurring in a pool of muddy water, more the dispersal of value in nature, more the thriving of Nature.
Only humans hoard things because of their notional familiarity and value or wealth.
