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 There is some debate concerning the origins of Sunday
Schools. As Sutherland (1990: 126) has commented, Robert
Raikes (1735-1811) is traditionally credited as pioneering
Sunday Schools in the 1780s; 'in fact teaching Bible reading
and basic skills on a Sunday was an established activity in
a number of eighteenth century Puritan and evangelical
congregations'.
In Wales, the circulating schools offered
one model of such activity (see the
development of adult schools).
That said, Robert Raikes made a notable contribution to the
development of Sunday schooling. Robert Raikes started his
first school for the children of chimney sweeps in Sooty
Alley, Gloucester (opposite the city prison) in 1780.
Described as 'cheery, talkative, flamboyant and warm-hearted
(Kelly 1970: 75), Raikes was able to use his position as
proprietor and editor of the Gloucester Journal to publicize
the work.
After his first editorial in 1783, schools spread
'with astonishing rapidity' (op. cit.) In 1785 an
undenominational national organization, the Sunday School
Society, was set up to co-ordinate and develop the work. By
1784 there were said to be 1800 pupils in Manchester and Salford, and Leeds the same. Significantly, 'it was a
characteristic of Sunday schools in both the North of
England and in Wales that they were attended by adults as
well as children (Kelly 1970: 76)
The idea of the Sunday
School caught the imagination of a number involved in
evangelical churches and groupings. Most notably,
Hannah
More and her sister Martha founded a number of schools in
the Mendip Hills that involved innovation. These lay in the
pedagogy they developed; the range of activities they became
involved in; and the extent to which publicity concerning
their activities encouraged others to develop initiatives.
They attempted to make school sessions entertaining and
varied. Programmes had to be planned and suited to the level
of the students. There needed to be variety and classes had
to be as entertaining as possible (she advised using singing
when energy and attention was waning). She also argued that
it was possible to get the best out of children if their
affections 'were engaged by kindness'. Furthermore, she made
the case that terror did not pay (Young and Ashton 1956).
However, she still believed it was a 'fundamental error to
consider children as innocent beings' rather than as beings
of 'a corrupt nature and evil dispositions' (More 1799: 44,
quoted by Thompson 1968: 441).
Sunday schools as working class institutions
While the activities of middle class philanthropists were
significant, it could be argued that Sunday Schools came to
represent a significant strand of organized working-class
activity. By the mid-1800s many Sunday Schools had passed
into the control of working people, although the membership
of chapels would appear to have been drawn rather more from
the skilled than the un-skilled working class (McLeod, 1984,
p.24). Three quarters of working class children were
attending such schools in 1851 (Lacquer 1976: 44). This was
popular provision on a massive scale.
Laquer suggests that the key element in the success of
Sunday Schools was that they provided the education and
expressed the values that working-class parents wanted for
their children. In particular, it was the transmission of
the values of the 'respectable' working class or labour
aristocracy that were stressed: self-discipline, industry,
thrift, improvement, egalitarianism and communalism. Sunday
Schools, when considered in this light, paralleled other
working class institutions such as friendly societies, trade
unions and savings banks. Sunday Schools were used not
simply to improve literacy and religious knowledge but also,
arguably, to enhance the culture of working class life.
However, the view that Sunday Schools were the actual
creation of a working class culture of respectability and
self-reliance has been questioned. Dick (1980) claimed that
Sunday Schools have to be seen as essentially middle class
conservative institutions directed at the improvement of
working class young people from above. Thompson argued that
they helped contribute to the political defeats of
working-class radicalism (1968: 411-440), although other
writers have advanced the counter argument that the chapels
and Sunday Schools were actually an integral part of the
same movement (Hobsbawm 1964).
Sunday schools and informal education
We can see something of the contribution of Sunday schools
as formal educational institutions. There is the obvious
area of Christian education. However, the need to access the
bible directly also entailed some teaching around reading.
Yet perhaps their more informal and associational qualities
are of equal significance. Services, Sunday schools and
associated activities had the special advantage of being one
of the few organized and 'respectable' social occasions
where sex segregation was not imposed. By the 1890's Joseph
Lawson was able to write:
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Chapels are now more inviting - have better music - service
of song - which cannot help being attractive to the young as
well as beneficial to all. They have sewing classes,
bazaars, concerts, and the drama; cricket and football
clubs, and harriers; societies for mutual improvement and
excursions to the seaside (quoted in Cunningham 1980: 181)
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The scale of such
associational activity is of great
significance - and its educational power should not be
underestimated.
In the early 1990s Konrad Elsdon (1995) and his colleagues
undertook a large scale survey of local voluntary
organizations in Britain. Two things were striking about
their work. First, the sheer scale of involvement. Around 12
million women and men were involved in running 1.3 million
bodies - and what is especially interesting here is that
these were what we might describe as associations - 'small
democracies' (1995: 39). Second, Elsdon and his colleagues
demonstrated empirically the educative potential of
voluntary groups. They comment on:
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... the great range of learning, change and satisfaction
over and above those which are deliberate, inherent in the
organization's objectives, and expected by their members.
The one which was given priority almost universally, and
reported as being of greater importance than the content
objective of the organization, is quite simply growth in
confidence, and its ramifications and secondary effects of
self-discovery, freedom in forging relationships and
undertaking tasks, belief in oneself and in one's potential
as a human being and an agent, and ability to learn and
change both in the context of the organization's objectives
and in others. (1995: 47) |
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Besides individual growth, there are significant political
gains. Malcolm Knowles argued, for example, that, 'these
groups are the foundation stones of our democracy. Their
goals largely determine the goals of our society' (Knowles
1950: 9).
References
Cunningham, H. (1980) Leisure in the Industrial Revolution,
Beckenham: Croom Helm.
Dick, M. (1980) 'The myth of the working class Sunday
School', History of Education 9(1).
Elsdon, K. T. with Reynolds, J. and Stewart, S. (1995)
Voluntary Organizations. Citizenship, learning and change,
Leicester: NIACE.
Hobsbawm, E. (1964) Labouring Men. Studies in the history of
labour, London: Weidenfeld.
Hole, J. (1860) 'Light, More Light' on the Present State of
Education Amongst the Working Classes of Leeds, London:
Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts.
Kelly, T. (1970) A History of Adult Education in Great
Britain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Knowles, M. (1950) Adult Informal Education, New York:
Association Press.
Laqueur, T. W. (1976) Religion and Respectability. Sunday
schools and working class culture, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
McLeod, H. (1984) Religion and the Working Class in
Nineteenth Century Britain, London: Macmillan.
Sutherland, G. (1990) 'Education' in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.)
The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950 Volume 3:
Social Agencies and Institutions, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Thompson, E. P. (1968) The Making of the English Working
Class, London: Penguin.
Young, A. F. and Ashton, E. T. (1956) British Social Work in
the Nineteenth Century, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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