The New Dutch Catechism

Extract

When theologians grumble and growl and commissions sit, a mere schoolmaster might have the sense to leave a book like this alone. It is true that the same theologians who bare their teeth at the little eccentricities of the Dutch Catechism have not, through the long years of damage, waved our own aloft shrieking for the faggot, an omission which anyone really interested in education must find it hard to forgive. Even without such unchristian, carping thoughts, an educator not hooked on the ancient catalogues of angelic powers might well go in to bat for the Dutch simply on the grounds that they have produced the right educational approach.

It is not only its approach that I welcome, the content is often of immediate interest and importance to the schoolmaster, e.g. the section on ‘The faith to which one is bred’ in which are discussed the problems of child education and eventual personal acceptance and conversion that are built in to the practice of infant baptism. The views expressed endear the authors to me, but more yet the manner in which the problem is discussed in the light of the experience of the reader and the attempt to initiate trains of thought—and so it is not the content so much as the catechism’s significance in education that I intend to discuss.

Other catechisms in use have not shown much interest in thought, only in answers—sometimes accompanied by dogmatically phrased ‘reasons’ in lieu of thoughtful discussion, but, with some less convincing answers, the bald statement alone without discussion or context.