What a special day! Thought that I would post two blogs today! Have you ever wondered as you go to "church" how it got it's form or do you just go without a care in the world as to how the "church" became what you know (?) and love (?) today? Today, another history lesson to wet your appetite for more. Before I begin, did you notice that I italicized the word "church"  and placed it between quote marks? Well, I will get into that in another blog. Today, though we begin with the origin of "Sunday school".

The Origin Of Sunday School

Have you ever wondered were Sunday school originated? In this article I will give you a brief history on the origin of Sunday schools.

Sunday schools began as schools for the poor. They were created in England around the year 1780. The schools provided rudimentary instruction to working people on their free day. By the 1790’s there were several of these schools in the United States.

The Philadelphia schools were organized for the benefit of such persons of either sex (and of any age) as cannot afford to educate themselves, were run by the First Day Society, which paid teachers to instruct pupils in reading and copying from the Bible. [Thomas Laquer, Religion and Respectability: The English Sunday School and the Formation of a Respectable Working Class (New Haven 1977); Edwin Wilbur Rice, The Sunday-School Movement, 1780-1917 and the American Sunday-School Union, 1817-1917 (Philadelphia 1917)]

These schools had the additional purpose of controlling children’s activities. Employment of children in industries had brought together youth of similar ages who worked together on weekdays and spent their Sundays playing in alleys and wharves, to the great disturbance of the families in the vicinity of such places, and the profanation of the day. [Albert Matthews, Early Sunday Schools in Boston, (1919) p 280]

Sunday schools provided an alternative to Sunday rowdiness. The schools would also teach proper behavior, enforcing cleanliness, providing Sunday clothing, and reprimanding children for lying, swearing, talking in an indecent manner, or other misbehavior. [First Day Society Rules, in Board of Visitors Minutes, February 1, 1791, Presbyterian Historical Society.]

For the next three decades, Sunday schools were part of an informal network of free schools operated by various religious and philanthropic groups to provide rudimentary education to children of the poor. Depending on their sponsorship and frequency of meeting, these schools placed more or less emphasis on religious and moral instruction. Schools run by the New York Free School Society, for example, combined daily academic instruction with Sunday attendance at Sunday schools. In October 1811, Presbyterian missionary Robert May opened an evening Sunday school in Philadelphia in which, unlike previous free schools, he taught religious doctrine solely and without remuneration. Schools resembling May’s became increasingly common during the decade 1810-1820 as young, newly converted Protestants turned Sunday teaching as a means of expressing their newfound convictions. By 1820, there were several hundred Sunday schools in the United States. All emphasized religious instruction over reading and writing, although most taught the later subjects as a means of inculcating the former. Many Sunday school organizers, in fact, began lobbying for extension of a system of free daily schools so that they would be free to teach religion alone on Sundays. [Robert May Sunday School Minutebook, 1811-1812, Presbyterian Historical Society.]

Sunday schools then aimed at teaching basic Protestantism to children of the unchurched poor. The Bible provided the text for teaching the truths of the Gospel, a knowledge of which, Protestants believed, was essential for moral living and good citizenship. Knowledge of the Bible, they felt, would teach pupils the duty required of them as social, rational and accountable beings. [Kensington Sunday School Association Minutes, Constitution, 1817, Presbyterian Historical Society.]

Students busied themselves memorizing prescribed portions of the Old and New Testaments, and vying with each other for weekly prizes awarded those who memorized the largest number of verses. Grounding the memorization practice on the principle that so much Divine Truth lodged in the mind cannot fail of good effort, teachers encouraged students to commit to memory large portions of the Bible. [Buffalo Sunday School Union, Religious Intelligencer 4 (September 25, 1819): 270-271.]

Many schools used a ticket reward system whereby students received one blue ticket for every ten verses memorized, traded six blue tickets for one red, and eventually cashed in the red tickets at a value of one-half cent each toward purchasing Sunday school books or tracts. [Rice, Sunday-School Movement, p. 297; Frank Glenn Lankard, A History of the American Sunday School Curriculum (New York and Cincinnati, 1927), p.134.]

The assumptions behind memorization were soon challenged. Teachers quickly realized that pupils were often more motivated by a desire for red tickets than by a thirst for Bible knowledge. The heart is left unimproved by moral truth, complained a typical critic of the memorization-reward system (perhaps he had had to listen while an eager student recited the begats). Emphasizing the importance of understanding what one learned, Sunday school organizers began actively discouraging random memorization of Bible verses. [The Reward System, American Sunday School Magazine 5 (November, 1828): 322.]