Socialist Sunday School

Socialist Sunday Schools (SSS) were set up as an alternative to Christian Sunday Schools in the United Kingdom. They arose in response to a feeling as to the inadequacy of the orthodox Sunday Schools as a training ground for the children of socialists and of the need for some organised and systematic method of presenting the socialist point of view and of teaching the ideals and principles of socialism to the children, youths and maidens in the country.

In the United States of America a radical Sunday School movement linked to the German-American socialist movement emerged in New York and Chicago in the 1880s and again on a broader scale as part of the Modern School Movement during the first decade of the 20th Century. An even larger network of American Socialist Sunday Schools, closely paralleling the British movement, was launched by members of the Socialist Party of America during the first two decades of the 20th Century.

The earliest use of secular Sunday Schools by the radical movement began in Great Britain in the early 1830s, when adherents of Robert Owen and Chartism opened Sunday training schools for their children. These schools continued to operate until sometime in the decade of the 1850s, fizzling out with the decline of the early radical movement.

For a generation, no such schools existed in Great Britain. Only in 1886 did Socialist Sunday Schools begin to reemerge in Great Britain. The institution was popularized by Mary Gray in 1892, a member of the Social Democratic Federation, who ran a soup kitchen for the children of the dock strike. Her aim, on realising they had little or no education, was to influence and educate them and make them aware of their socialist responsibilities and provide what was lacking in their day schools. She started the first Sunday with only one other besides her own two children but twenty years later there were approximately one hundred and twenty schools throughout the country, twenty of them being in London itself.

In 1894, another Socialist Sunday School was created by trade unionist Tom Anderson. By 1912 there were over 200 Socialist Sunday Schools throughout Britain. In their early days they encountered opposition from local authorities and politicians, who argued that Socialist Sunday Schools were subverting the minds of young people with political and anti-religious doctrines and teachings.

...
Wikipedia