Teaching Children by Rote?

“What is the use,” you may hear someone ask, “of teaching our children Bible verses, catechism questions and answers, and Bible Doctrines when they are too young to understand them? Just memorizing something does not help them any. All they do is rattle them off, without knowing what they are saying. Wouldn’t it be better to wait for a while until they are older and can understand such things better?”

We have heard this kind of reasoning time and time again. We may also have been influenced by it. We may have heard that it is no longer custom in many schools to teach the children by rote. They are supposed to do what they have an interest in and what they can, therefore, understand. Is it perhaps old-fashioned and pedagogically unsound to have the children learn by rote, while many educators have given up the practice entirely? The argument appears sound.

But think for a moment! Among the gifts parents present to their children on their birthdays are undoubtedly various articles of clothing. Since children grow by leaps and bounds, parents are often careful to select clothes that are about one size too large, so that the children may grow into them.

Is it too much to give our children some spiritual clothing that they can grow into? It is true that they will learn much that they cannot yet fully understand; but the Bible verses, prayers, and catechism questions and answers that they learn will form a coat of biblical truth into which they will gradually mature.

As this coat is gradually formed, we see the child growing into it—much faster than we had expected! Very quickly the questions come. Since there is already some knowledge present, the answers are more readily understood.

Children are always seeing things and learning things that they cannot altogether understand. If we do not give them the coat of biblical truth, in any case they will receive a coat—one they will surely also have to grow into—one that is not of God but of the world.

Let us give our children the opportunity—the privilege—to say, “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, a light upon my path.” Let us pray that God may apply His Word to their heart that, by grace, our children my confess, “Thy Word have I hid in my heart....”

D. Engelsma is principal of the Plymouth Christian Elementary School of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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