Edification/Education

To edify is to build, and scripture uses the word for building up persons and communities in charity. Restoration revelation makes learning a duty shared by teacher and student, and that shared duty supplies a standard for judging new technologies of teaching.

Edification and education both begin as words about the household. Edify comes from the Latin aedificare, "to build," formed from aedes, a dwelling, especially the dwelling of a god, or temple. Educate comes from the Latin educare, "to bring up" or "rear" a child, a verb related to educere, "to lead out." In common usage edification has come to mean a pleasant sense of uplift, and education the transfer of information from one mind to another. Paul set a different measure for both when he wrote to the Corinthians, "Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth" (1 Corinthians 8:1). Restoration scripture takes up the image of building and applies it to the formation of persons and of a people.

Building the House

The scriptural vocabulary of edification describes the construction of a household, and it treats the forming of persons as a kind of house-building.

The Greek word Paul uses, oikodomē, joins oikos, "house," to the root of a verb meaning "to build," and in his letters it describes the slow work of joining believers into one structure. He pictured the church as a body "fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth," which "maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love" (Ephesians 4:16). Each member contributes something, and the building up is mutual.

The Hebrew Bible offers a parallel that readers of the English text cannot see. The verb chanak means to "train up" a child, as in "Train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6). The same verb describes dedicating a new building, as when the law excused from battle any man "that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it" (Deuteronomy 20:5). Scholars debate how the two senses are related, and the shared idea is likely a formal beginning or inauguration. Even so, Hebrew hearers would have heard the training of a child and the dedication of a house in the same word, and the related noun chanukkah, "dedication," names the dedication of altars and walls and, later, the feast of the temple's rededication.

A House of Learning

Restoration revelation commands the Saints to learn together and prescribes how their learning should be shared.

In the winter of 1832⁠–33, a revelation told the Saints to "seek learning, even by study and also by faith," and to "establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning" (D&C 88:118-119). The School of the Prophets, organized at Kirtland weeks later, was its first fulfillment, and the temple was its intended home. It has long been recognized that this revelation gave Latter-day Saints their high regard for schooling. Less often noticed is its instruction on the conduct of the class. Everyone in the class was to speak in turn: "let not all be spokesmen at once; but let one speak at a time and let all listen unto his sayings, that when all have spoken that all may be edified of all, and that every man may have an equal privilege" (D&C 88:122). An earlier revelation describes the same exchange, in which "he that preacheth and he that receiveth, understand one another, and both are edified and rejoice together" (D&C 50:22). Said differently, edification in Restoration scripture runs in both directions.

Tutors, Machines, and the Test

Machine tutoring can extend the privilege of a personal teacher to every learner, and it can also do the learner's work for them.

In 1984 an educational psychologist reported that students taught one-to-one with mastery methods outperformed classroom students by about two standard deviations, and he posed the problem of finding group methods as effective. Later reviews found tutoring's advantage smaller, though still large. Software now offers something close to a personal tutor at little cost. In a 2023 trial in a university physics course, students who studied with a carefully designed AI tutor learned more, in less time, than they did in an active-learning class. Yet a field experiment with high school mathematics students found that those given unrestricted access to a chatbot solved practice problems better and then scored worse on exams without it, while a version built to give hints and withhold full solutions largely avoided the harm. Mormon transhumanists count such tools among the means God provides for human growth. The risk is the one Paul named, knowledge that inflates without building: students can collect correct answers and still fail to learn. The test for any technology of learning is whether it builds up the learner's own understanding and the community's shared capacity, so that all may be edified of all with an equal privilege, or supplies answers that leave its users dependent and its benefits with a few.