Growth

From the human eye, growth happens when we watch a child grow and we can mark their height with a texta on the wall, a flower buds and blossoms, a tree grows taller and its trunk expands. We associate this sense of expansion with ‘getting bigger’ and apply it to our practical understanding of growth as getting more and bigger, expanding.

Our society’s physical presence, buildings, and adornments can show that it is growing too. All these ideas connects growth with progress.

The capitalist idea of growth as ‘getting more’ is a part of our world. Yet growth can also be achieved through more subtle means and connected to nature and our natural ways. What constitutes growth really depends on the value and models by which we understand it.

Growth can be the growth of opinions or ideas. Growth can be about the books we read where our ideas, opinions, knowledge and understanding of topics grow.

The quality that unites these two different ways of thinking about growth is time.

Over time, things grow.

But do we allow time for knowledge to grow, building and layering like the rings of a tree? Time to grow means choosing a topic and staying with it, slowly inquiry and growing knowledge like a tree grows slowly over the years?

To continue to facilitate growth within education, theories such as aesthetics looks to non-capitalist ideology where we value the growth of our being as a living, natural being. We grow ourselves rather than grow our things.

Until next time,

Mon x