1 Timothy 6:20, in the KJV, reads, “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:” The Greek word translated ‘science’ is gnōsis. The basis for our word ‘knowledge’. Frankly, I am surprised that 7 of the 62 English translations retain ‘science’. Puts a whole other spin on appeals to ‘science’ today, doesn’t it?
But that’s not my spin. My spin is that in Austin, Texas I first heard of the proposal to 3-D print tiny homes for the homeless at about 10,000 dollars each. I don’t know what happened, but I do know a whole subdivision in the ‘burbs of Austin is being made by digital 3-D printers. The homes cost from 450 to 600 thousand dollars.
It’s fantastic to watch as, much like the old dot matrix printers, you see these printers going back and forth disgorging layer after layer of a complete house. The only downside the new owners report is that it is absolutely impossible to get a digital signal through the walls. In my mind, the fact they look like something built by Red China, the Soviet Union, or 1984 is off-putting.
I think this is a cost-effective way to build a house, but it’s a better way to learn. Knowledge is stacked upon knowledge one layer at a time. This is not how postmodernists learn. They learn by garnering a seed here, a point there, a ‘fact’ from this website, a point of view they take over from someone they follow.
This is what Paul is accused of being in Athens in Acts 17:18, but what in fact his hearers are. Acts 17:18 says, “And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. And some were saying, “What would this idle babbler wish to say?” Others, “He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,”– because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection.” The word translated ”ignorant babbler” is the Greek spermologos. Strong’s defines this as “a seed-picker”. Picture a bird walking back and forth across your lawn picking here, there, and there. The Holy Spirit describes the denizens of Athens’ marketplace this way in Acts 17:21, “Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new.” They went to the marketplace to pick up anything new. These two passages to me describe the postmodern way of learning.
It has been proven with cameras that track eye movement, that no one reads on the internet like they do in books. As in-person work is different than remote, so in-person education is different from distance learning. Woe unto us who will be at the mercy of doctors, lawyers, and especially pastors who have learned remotely, picking up things here and there, rather than nourished plant-like.
As the Peripatetic philosophers gave way to the Stoics in Greece, i.e., as the walking phosphors gave way to those on porches not moving, has education by an accumulation of facts given way to educating by factoid gathering? Will students really “get what they need” from the various seeds thrown out by the teachers, preachers, websites, and influencers or get what they want? Nobody ever thought to produce a useable garden this way. Why do we think it will produce truly useful people?
