The Sunday School Movement And The American Sunday School Union

This engrossing book traces the social history of Protestant Sunday schools from their origins in the 1790s--when they taught literacy to poor working children--to their consolidation in the 1870s, when they had become the primary source of new church members for the major Protestant denominations. Anne M. Boylan describes not only the schools themselves but also their place within a national network of evangelical institutions, their complementary relationship to local common schools, and their connection with the changing history of youth and women in the nineteenth century. Her book is a signal contribution to our understanding of American religious and social history, education history, women's history, and the history of childhood.

Today's Sunday schools are a pale shadow of what they were in the past. Churches have found other ways of serving children and young people and carrying out adult education. From a historical point of view the Sunday schools have immense significance. As late as the 1950s approximately half the children in Great Britain were associated with Sunday schools. In the nineteenth century Sunday schools were part of general educational provision. With National, British, and Ragged schools, Sunday schools represented the Christian philanthropic impulse to provide a basic education to the public at large and at low cost. The role of the churches in educational provision is again a topic of public interest and the time is right to reflect on some of the lessons of the past. A range of experts have been asked to assess different aspects of the history of the Sunday school movement: Clyde Binfield, Faith Bowers, John H. Y. Briggs, Grayson Ditchfield Hugh McLeod, Stephen Orchard, Jack Priestley, Geoff Robson, and Doreen Rosman. They provide a remarkable survey of many aspects of Sunday schools, from their origin to their reinvention, from teaching the catechism to promoting sport.

Excerpt from The Sunday-School Movement: And the American Sunday-School Union It is significant that the greatest growth of the modern Sunday-school has not been where it started, but in America. The membership in the United States is easily double that of Great Britain, and equals that in all the other countries of the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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