Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 90:357 (Jan 1933)
Article: Religious Education – Development Of Persons
Author: John E. Kuizenga

BSac 90:357 (Jan 1933) p. 83

Religious Education – Development Of Persons

John E. Kuizenga

I demolish theories and any rampart thrown up to resist the knowledge of God, I take every project prisoner to make it obey Christ.—2 Cor. 10:5, Moffat’s Translation.

Chesterton has a curious figure which he thinks expresses the difficulties facing modern thought. He says that when Whistler was preparing to make a portrait, he had the habit of rapidly sketching some twenty sketches of the subject. Now suppose that every time Whistler turned to the subject who was sitting for him, he found some other person sitting there. How could he ever sketch a portrait? Would he not grow discouraged and give it up? That according to Chesterton is exactly the effect of the notion that Christianity is adherence to a series of ever changing ideals. But he does not go far enough. It seems to me that to get a parallel, we must imagine not only that the subject changes all the time, but that Whistler himself changes all the time. Then how in the world can there be a portrait, and how could we talk of progress?

He would be a brave man who would undertake to tell exactly what are the characteristics of modern education. One of our best minds, himself a professor of the philosophy of education in a great university, in his estimate of the new education gives us twenty-five characteristics, and on these makes twenty-five comments which are both commendation and warning in each case—rather a bewildering outcome for one who tries to form a correct judgment!1 It would not be true to say that the new education is adrift. Let us rather say the complexity of our new knowledge is so great, and the experiments so many, that it is hard to know what we are at. Perhaps we may find two characteristics that would be generally admitted, first that education is concerned with the development of persons,

BSac 90:357 (Jan 1933) p. 84

and second that these persons are to be developed by action, primarily by response to actual situations in the actual world. Both of these represent gains in the field of education.

Education as the development of persons is a gain, because it shows pretty clearly the aims that educational theory has discarded. Gone is the goal of mere knowledge, gone is the goal of mere practical efficiency, gone is the goal of mere adjustment to citizenship, and gone finally is the goal of mere ethical conduct. The person is something larger and greater than all these, and it is with this larger person that we reckon today. The other goal, development of persons in relation to actual environment, is also an educational gain. Life is the real...