During the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, multitudes of children worked in factories from Monday to Saturday. On Sundays they would fill the streets in “misery and idleness… in noise and riot… cursing and swearing” (Cliff, P., 1986).
Consequently, efforts began to be made to establish Sunday schools, held in teachers’ homes initially, to instill Protestant Christian values and literacy to help improve the children’s lives. While advocates believed this would divert them away from crime, others worried that an educated poor would become revolutionary!
Two of the British pioneers of the Sunday school were Hannah Ball (1734-92), who opened her Buckinghamshire establishment in 1769, and Robert Raikes (1736-1811), a newspaper publisher in Gloucestershire, whose accounts of his philanthropic Sunday school venture helped to spread the idea.
Since the advent of compulsory schooling and particularly since WW2, the Sunday school has largely disappeared and been replaced in some churches by after-service children’s activity sessions. Over its roughly 200-year existence, Sunday school enrolment reached around 2,500,000 during the 1800s. Taking a snapshot of its later decline, however, in 1953 attendees numbered 1,300,000 but in 1980 this was 500,000.
Overall, the Sunday school movement deserves due recognition as a sincere contribution to social stability during Britain’s rapid industrialisation.
(Image: Frank Beard, 1896, at itoldya420.getarchive.net / Public Domain)
