MONDAY SCHOOL

by James Lincoln Warren

It’s interesting, the tidbits you pick up when you’re engaged in research. My primary detective series takes place in the latter 18th century, and during a recent foray into source material, I encountered the following passage:

“Some of the clergy in different parts of this county, bent upon attempting a reform among the children of the lower class, are establishing Sunday schools for rendering the Lord’s-day subservient to the ends of instruction, which has hitherto been prostituted to bad purposes. Farmers and other inhabitants of the towns and villages complain that they receive more injury in their property on the Sabbath than all the week besides; this in a great measure proceeds from, the lawless state of the younger class, who are allowed to run wild on that day, free from every restraint. To remedy this evil, persons duly qualified are employed to instruct those that cannot read; and those that may have learned to read are taught the catechism and conducted to church. By thus keeping their minds engaged, the day passes profitably and not disagreeably. In those parishes where this plan has been adopted, we are assured that the behaviour of the children is greatly civilised. The barbarous ignorance in which they had before lived being in some degree dispelled, they begin to give proofs that those persons are mistaken who consider the lower orders of mankind as incapable of improvement, and therefore think an attempt to reclaim there impracticable, or at least not worth the trouble.”

—Robert Raikes the Younger, Gloucester Journal, November 3, 1783

Raikes was being modest; in fact, he himself is usually credited with inventing Sunday School, and using his newspaper, the above referenced Gloucester Journal, as a platform to improve the lives of the poor by advocating the universal adoption of Sabbath-day instruction. In Raikes’s day, Sunday School wasn’t restricted to Bible study or hagiography, and was a primary influence on establishing state-supported schools for the general population, what in America we call public schools. (In Britain, a “public school” is an educational institution to which one sent one’s sons in lieu of engaging a private tutor; they’re what we call “private” or “prep” schools, and include Eton, Harrow, and Rugby, all bastions of the upper class.)

As Raikes indicated, the first Sunday Schools used the Anglican catechism to teach children how to read. This obviously entailed religious as well as literary instruction, and when I went to an American United Methodist Sunday School as a child, we mostly learned Bible stories from both testaments, although there was the story of John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, and certain heroic tales of early American circuit preachers bringing the word of God into the wilderness, too.

I can’t say that going to Sunday School made me a religious man. I’ve written before that my religious convictions are my own, and I’m not pausing here to foist them on anyone else, so don’t worry—I loathe proselytism. But I do want to preach a little about the stories themselves.

The eminent Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye once opined that a proper liberal education should consist of teaching Greek myths and Bible stories. His idea was that understanding the essential stories that shaped our culture is fundamental to understanding all the subsequent stories produced by our culture. Gentle Readers may recall that I made this argument a few months ago. (“GRAND ALLUSION“)

In fact, those Greek myths and Bible stories provide the fabric in which everything we understand about human behavior is woven. It’s not an accident that Freud turned to the myth of Oedipus to describe his own twisted theory of the incestual urge—Freud’s invocation of a long-standing myth led his apostate disciple Jung to come up with the concept of archetype. Today we still describe events in terms of David and Goliath, Abel and Cain, Prodigal Sons, and Roads to Damascus. These latter, of course, are all Biblical references.

The Bible also contains the earliest existent short story, by which I mean not merely a tale, but the historically intact exact text of a self-contained tale, to wit, the Book of Ruth 1, which, in case the Gentle Reader is unfamiliar with it, is nothing less than a plea for racial tolerance, and contains some of the most moving language ever written: “And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”

But you don’t learn about these things in a vacuum. They are certainly not taught in public schools, and if they were, that could create all sorts of difficulties. Nevertheless, I am frequently complimented on my knowledge of the Bible, and my response is always the same: “Thank my Sunday School teachers.”

I’ll be honest, I hated Sunday School when I was a kid. After I turned 18, my mother woke me on Sunday morning and said, “Jim, you’re now an adult, and you don’t have to go to church anymore if you don’t want to. But I want tell you that I think it is extremely important and I think you should go.”

I said, “Have a good time at church, Mom,” and rolled over and went back to sleep. Usually the only times you’ll find me in a church these days is for weddings and funerals. But I am deeply grateful to and for all those tough middle-aged Texan ladies who shoved Bible stories down my throat on Sundays, because without them, I would be culturally much more ignorant. Ignorance is bad. And I still read the Bible and learn from it all the time.

Consider this my Monday School lesson.

1. I am one of those who does not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and I agree with many scholars that the Book of Ruth, like the Book of Esther, is a product of conscious invention and not an actual historical record. Your opinion may differ, and that’s fine with me—I already mentioned that I am no proselyte. [↩]