Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The original Sunday School was a charitable effort to educate children of the poor in England in the 1700s. Given the state of government-funded education in America today, perhaps churches should go back to the original.

I attended Sunday School as a child. In a way, I still attend Sunday School today. That is the name given to Bible lessons conducted in churches across America and elsewhere every Sunday morning.

This is not how Sunday School started. (See Wikipedia for the history of Sunday School.)

In the 1700s in England, rich people educated their children privately. Poor people didn’t educate their children at all. Their kids went to the factory with them 12 hours a day six days a week. Churches started schools on Sunday for these poor children. The goal was to teach reading and writing so that the poor would have better lives.

Now for the controversial part:

I believe that taxpayer-funded, government-administered schools in America are failing large segments of our society, especially children of the poor.

Now for the dreamy-eyed idealistic part:

I think churches in America should open their doors to children of the poor to work with them on reading and writing.

Start at 8 am with breakfast. Teach reading and writing from 9 am until noon. End with a lunch and send the children home. There will be no grades as in K through 12; there will only be performance. When a child can read and comprehend a book, move to the next one. (The McGuffey Readers will suffice.) When a child can write answers to a set of questions, move to the next set.

This would be an enormous undertaking. People would devote enormous resources to the children of other people expecting nothing in return.

Who else would do such a thing but churches?