Sunday School

Sunday school is credited to a specific person and a specific year. Robert Raikes, a newspaper publisher in Gloucester, England, organized a school in 1780 to teach poor working children to read, using the Bible as the reading text, meeting on the one day those children were not at work. Literacy, not doctrine, was the immediate goal: many of the children who attended worked six days a week in the citys pin factories and had no other opportunity for schooling at all.

The model spread with striking speed. Within a few decades Sunday schools operated across Britain and were carried to North America, becoming closely bound up with the broader movement for popular literacy in the English speaking world, run largely by volunteer teachers and funded by local subscription rather than by any central church authority. For much of the early nineteenth century a Sunday school was as likely to be teaching a child the alphabet as it was to be teaching a catechism.

That combined role narrowed over the following century. As government run schools took over general literacy education across Britain, North America and eventually much of the rest of the world, the specifically educational half of the Sunday school original purpose became redundant, and the institution that remained was religious instruction alone, delivered in age graded classes alongside or instead of the main congregational service.

It remains a standard feature of congregational life in many Protestant churches today, and in adapted forms within other Christian traditions, though attendance has declined sharply across much of Western Europe and North America even as comparable programs continue to grow in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Sunday school's own history is of an English literacy program that narrowed into religious instruction once state schools took over general education. A comparable narrowing happened independently inside Jewish communities, without either tradition borrowing the idea from the other.

Talmud Torah schools, communally funded institutions teaching Hebrew reading and religious texts to children who could not afford private tutoring, existed in Jewish communities for centuries before Robert Raikes opened his first classroom in Gloucester, serving a purpose closer to general as well as religious education in societies where Jewish children were often excluded from, or segregated within, non Jewish schooling. As state education systems expanded across Europe and North America and Jewish children increasingly attended those schools for general subjects during the week, supplementary Hebrew schools, often meeting on Sunday mornings or on weekday afternoons after regular school, took over specifically religious and Hebrew language instruction, the same functional split that happened to the English Sunday school once government schooling absorbed literacy teaching.

The result in both traditions is a children's institution named for when it meets, a Sunday morning or an after school afternoon, rather than for what it teaches, because what it teaches changed once a different institution took over the half of the original mission that could be handled elsewhere. Neither tradition needed to copy the other to reach a similar shape from a similar pressure.