28 June

An example I think of how splitting knowledge up into 'subjects' destroys education. Trigonometry again, we all learn at school how to do it. Sometimes a teacher might even tell us the 'history', how the Greeks invented it to measure things etc. The real story though of trig is the encounter of two civilisations - Egypt and Greece. It's the encounter of two graphisms, alphabetic writing (Greece) and pictograms (picture writing - Egypt). Alphabetic writing notates sounds, pictograms represent things. A simple trig triangle like this takes the pictogram - the triangle - from Egypt. The alphabetic letters are Greek. Why did this marriage happen? It's the birth of abstraction itself, the idea that ideas can 'represent' the world. The Greeks wanted a way for their words to connect with actual things, and Egyptian pictograms seemed the way; put the 'things' on the same flat page, as diagrams, and have the words or letters then interact with them. But the world is right there still, in the abstraction. The sounds are there in the alphabetic characters, the things in the diagrams. Generations of people have now been taught that knowledge is 'about' the world, that it describes an 'objective truth' of how the world is, separate to the flat page. Idealist rubbish, it's a trick.