by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
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.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This is not how Sunday School started. (See Wikipedia for the history of Sunday School<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Now for the controversial part:<\/p>\n I believe that taxpayer-funded, government-administered schools in America are failing large segments of our society, especially children of the poor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now for the dreamy-eyed idealistic part:<\/p>\n I think churches in America should open their doors to children of the poor to work with them on reading and writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/a>.) When a child can write answers to a set of questions, move to the next set.<\/p>\n This would be an enormous undertaking. People would devote enormous resources to the children of other people expecting nothing in return.<\/p>\n Who else would do such a thing but churches?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[207],"class_list":["post-999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1000,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions\/1000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}