Things becoming obsolete

Last week someone left a plastic bag on my porch. It contained two hefty telephone directories. This yearly event used to annoy me. I have no use for phone books. If I want to find a person, company, or address I use the internet. Phone books are obsolete. Why do they go through the expense of printing and distributing them?

The same is true for school catalogues. Those now belong on a school’s website, made interactive and more useful by inserting links to those sections you’re interested in. But, like phone books school catalogues continue to insist themselves into homes and offices. I suppose some people still need a sense of the tangible. I know my wife does. I picked up the hefty plastic bag with the phone books and tossed them in the garbage, only to discover later in the day that my wife had retrieved them and placed them on the counter. When I asked her why she’d done that she replied, “They’re the new ones.” As if that logic made any sense to me. “New” does not instill something with value or relevance. Those phone books would have sat unused on the counter for a year if I’d not tossed them out again on garbage day (preventing their recovery once again).

Planned obsolescence is the norm in our throw-away culture. But many of us have a hard time throwing away things. I still have obsolete things cluttering my study and various drawers: CD-ROMs that won’t work (Windows 98, etc.), travel maps (I have a GPS mapping gadget), AAA Tripticks (remember those?), a drawer full of hundreds of 3 ½ inch computer data disks (the last three computer I’ve bought don’t have drives for that type of data storage) and more obsolete computer equipment and attachments than is reasonable (including yards of computer cables that won’t attach to anything ever again). The last time I tried to give away that stuff I got no takers.

But it isn’t just “stuff” that is becoming obsolete. One interesting, and anxious, discussion in theological education is whether the classic and basic ministerial degree, the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) is becoming obsolete. Recently one seminary ceased to offer the M.Div. degree. Other seminaries are facing challenges in maintaining their traditional residential M.Div. degree programs. It’s an interesting phenomenon in education not restricted to traditional theological education. Classical and liberal education programs have been in turmoil for decades as they strive to attract students to perennial disciplines.

I don’t want to make a guess as to how long the M.Div. will remain viable. But it’s an interesting philosophical and pragmatic question. What do you think?