Akron Plan

The Akron Plan was a scheme for the design of churches and other religious buildings that housed Sunday schools. It was characterized by a set of wedge-shaped classrooms that radiated from the direction of a central superintendent's platform. Doors or movable partitions could be closed to separate the classes, or opened to allow the entire body of pupils to participate in school-wide exercises.

Until about 1860, Sunday-school pupils of all ages were taught together in a single large room. After that, there was an increasing tendency for pupils to be taught separately, with instruction tailored to their ages, for most of the session. However, the superintendent conducted all-school exercises at the beginning and end of the session. To facilitate this, the building's interior layout had to enable the students to be quickly and efficiently divided into classes or brought together in a single body.

The Akron Plan was devised to address this need. It took its name from the city of Akron in the state of Ohio in the Great Lakes region of the United States, where it was developed for the construction of a church built in 1866–67. It was quickly adopted by Protestant churches across the United States.

The plan fell out of favor in the early 20th century, when Sunday schools changed their approach to one in which pupils were taught separately for the entire session, eliminating the school-wide exercises. The awkwardly shaped and imperfectly soundproofed rooms were poorly adapted for this new approach, and many of them underwent extensive remodelling. By the beginning of the 21st century, few intact Akron Plan interiors remained in existence.

The genesis of the Sunday school occurred in 1780 in Gloucester, England, when philanthropist Robert Raikes arranged for the teaching of a measure of literacy and religious instruction to slum children, most of whom worked six days a week and had Sunday as their only free day. The experiment proved successful and was taken up elsewhere; by Raikes's death in 1811, Sunday-school pupils numbered about a quarter-million, throughout the British Isles and in the United States.

With the passage of time, the exclusive focus on lower-class children was abandoned. The expansion to upper classes was pioneered by, among others, noted divine Lyman Beecher, who in about 1830 sent his children to Sunday school, and encouraged his neighbors to do likewise. Instruction in reading and writing was dropped, and the schools devoted themselves to religious education.

...
Wikipedia