We’re a band of little Comrades
Walking in the path of truth;
We are marching onward, onward,
Through the flowery land of youth.
Marching onward up to Manhood,
When we mean to join the fight,
Of the weak against oppression,
In the battle for the right.
The Socialist Sunday School Song Book
Socialist Sunday Schools were an outcome of the London Dock Strike of 1892, when Mary Gray (who later went on to become a member of the Socialist Party), began teaching the children of striking dockers about the causes and consequences of poverty. The idea caught the imagination and more than 200 Socialist Sunday Schools had been set up in the UK by 1914 and the concept became international. Socialist parents sent their children to the schools to ensure they were politically-aware. There were ten precepts and commandments to learn, and tunes or hymns to sing. Socialist Sunday School placed emphasis on teaching children socialist principles through play, and imbuing them with ideals of community spirit and fellowship. They worked in close harmony with the Labour Movement and were concerned with the spiritual and social objective of the human race with regard to daily life and conduct. At a time when youth movements were usually organised on gendered lines, they encouraged boys and girls to mix together in thought and play.
The purpose of the Socialist Sunday Schools was to challenge religion, individualism, nationalism, militarism prevalent in mainstream education help in supplanting capitalist social and economic relations with a more equitable and cooperative form, namely, socialism. Children would gradually adopt socialism voluntarily via process” and the result would be a “Cooperative Commonwealth”. Some schools produced banners that read 'Socialist Sunday School to teach us freedom of thought and freedom of self-expression', 'We desire to be just and loving to stand up for the weak and oppressed' and 'We want a new society founded on truth love and justice.'
The “Socialist Catechism”
Q. What is our object?
A. Our object is to realise socialism.
Q. What is meant by socialism?
A. Socialism means common ownership and control of those things we all need to live happily and well.
Q. On what principles does Socialism rest?
A. Socialism rests on the great principles of love, justice and truth.
Q. How can we apply these principles?
A. Through cultivating the spirit of service to others and the practice of mutual aid, we can apply these great principles and so hasten the advent of socialism.
The Socialist Sunday School movement brought brightness and comradeship into the lives of thousands of young people and adults in the drab towns and cities of early twentieth century Britain. Besides their Sunday meetings, schools ran festivals of music and dancing. They took children for rambles and camping expeditions in the countryside. The highlight of their year was May Day, when they joined the rest of the Labour movement in mammoth processions for peace and workers' international solidarity.
The movement began in Glasgow in the 1890s when a number of young men and women broke away from orthodox Christianity. It was a time when science seemed to undermine faith with the publicising of such works as Darwin's Origin of Species. One Glasgow dissident, Archie McArthur, retained a strong sense of mysticism after rejecting the Kirk. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, he believed that the universe was governed by a spirit of love which was working out its full realisation as Socialism. McArthur formed Glasgow Central Socialist Sunday School.
The schools began to spread in Glasgow. In 1900 McArthur moved to London as part of a missionary campaign to open schools there. He founded a monthly magazine, The Young Socialist, preaching in it his gospel of love and socialism and inviting children to write to him with their thoughts about it. The movement spread rapidly across London and also throughout Yorkshire. A national movement, the National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools Union, formed in 1909, however, traces its origin to the school opened in Glasgow by Caroline Martyn and Archie McArthur. It was established as a protest against, and an alternative to, the perceived bias and assumptions of the Church of Scotland and the regular churches. Its aims were to help the schools in their teaching of socialism. The schools were grouped in District Unions and for the first ten years were affiliated to the Council. However in 1920 the Constitution was amended to allow direct school affiliation which meant there was wide representation at the Annual Conference.
By 1912 there were 96 schools in England and Scotland, loosely organised as the National Council of British Socialist Sunday School Unions. Total membership was then calculated as 4540 children, 1788 adolescents and 6328 adults.
Slaves are they who dare not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather in silence shrink
From the Truth they need not think
Slaves are they who dare not be
In the right with two or three.
Socialist Sunday School birthday card inscription.
A parallel movement emerged in Lancashire but its ethos was very different. It took its tone from Robert Blatchford, the editor of the Clarion, who was an atheist and economic determinist and in the early years of the twentieth century there was a lot debate in The Young Socialist between these two camps. McArthur's followers insisted that the socialist future could only be built by instilling into the hearts of children the spirit of love and cooperation. The Lancashire tendency, many of them members of the Social Democratic Federation, influenced by Marxism, scoffed at their opponents' ‘moral appeal’ to the ‘religion of Socialism’. They insisted that children grew up to be workers and must be taught that capitalism thrived on the exploitation of labour. However, despite their disagreements the two sides cohabited peacefully enough in the National Council. Then, in 1914, the First World War broke out. The movement split. The Lancashire schools followed Blatchford in supporting Britain's declaration of war against Germany.
The “Socialist Catechism”
Q. What is our object?
A. Our object is to realise socialism.
Q. What is meant by socialism?
A. Socialism means common ownership and control of those things we all need to live happily and well.
Q. On what principles does Socialism rest?
A. Socialism rests on the great principles of love, justice and truth.
Q. How can we apply these principles?
A. Through cultivating the spirit of service to others and the practice of mutual aid, we can apply these great principles and so hasten the advent of socialism.
The Socialist Sunday School movement brought brightness and comradeship into the lives of thousands of young people and adults in the drab towns and cities of early twentieth century Britain. Besides their Sunday meetings, schools ran festivals of music and dancing. They took children for rambles and camping expeditions in the countryside. The highlight of their year was May Day, when they joined the rest of the Labour movement in mammoth processions for peace and workers' international solidarity.
The movement began in Glasgow in the 1890s when a number of young men and women broke away from orthodox Christianity. It was a time when science seemed to undermine faith with the publicising of such works as Darwin's Origin of Species. One Glasgow dissident, Archie McArthur, retained a strong sense of mysticism after rejecting the Kirk. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, he believed that the universe was governed by a spirit of love which was working out its full realisation as Socialism. McArthur formed Glasgow Central Socialist Sunday School.
The schools began to spread in Glasgow. In 1900 McArthur moved to London as part of a missionary campaign to open schools there. He founded a monthly magazine, The Young Socialist, preaching in it his gospel of love and socialism and inviting children to write to him with their thoughts about it. The movement spread rapidly across London and also throughout Yorkshire. A national movement, the National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools Union, formed in 1909, however, traces its origin to the school opened in Glasgow by Caroline Martyn and Archie McArthur. It was established as a protest against, and an alternative to, the perceived bias and assumptions of the Church of Scotland and the regular churches. Its aims were to help the schools in their teaching of socialism. The schools were grouped in District Unions and for the first ten years were affiliated to the Council. However in 1920 the Constitution was amended to allow direct school affiliation which meant there was wide representation at the Annual Conference.
By 1912 there were 96 schools in England and Scotland, loosely organised as the National Council of British Socialist Sunday School Unions. Total membership was then calculated as 4540 children, 1788 adolescents and 6328 adults.
Slaves are they who dare not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather in silence shrink
From the Truth they need not think
Slaves are they who dare not be
In the right with two or three.
Socialist Sunday School birthday card inscription.
A parallel movement emerged in Lancashire but its ethos was very different. It took its tone from Robert Blatchford, the editor of the Clarion, who was an atheist and economic determinist and in the early years of the twentieth century there was a lot debate in The Young Socialist between these two camps. McArthur's followers insisted that the socialist future could only be built by instilling into the hearts of children the spirit of love and cooperation. The Lancashire tendency, many of them members of the Social Democratic Federation, influenced by Marxism, scoffed at their opponents' ‘moral appeal’ to the ‘religion of Socialism’. They insisted that children grew up to be workers and must be taught that capitalism thrived on the exploitation of labour. However, despite their disagreements the two sides cohabited peacefully enough in the National Council. Then, in 1914, the First World War broke out. The movement split. The Lancashire schools followed Blatchford in supporting Britain's declaration of war against Germany.
In Glasgow, Yorkshire and London the schools followed Keir Hardie in opposing it. The movement appeared to thrive on persecution. By 1918 there were said to be 149 schools. During and after the war, The Young Socialist preached internationalism and anti-capitalism. It supported the strikes of coal miners and others against savage government spending cuts aimed at national debt reduction. It did not mean bowing the knee to the rod of capitalism. Far from it. These were years of workers' militancy in which the Socialist Sunday Schools reached its greatest strength.
Questions were asked in parliament and the then Secretary for Scotland was asked whether he was aware that the teachers in such schools systematically debauch the minds of the children concerned with revolutionary propaganda and what steps would he take to prevent such disastrous perversion of the purposes of Sunday schools?
The Socialist Sunday Schools that sprung up in Edinburgh provoked such strong feelings that in 1925 the Evening News ran an article headlined "Socialist Sunday Schools: Stirred Up By The Devil." There were about eight in Edinburgh when the movement was at its height, with another three in the rest of the Lothians.
Betty McKenzie who went to the Leith school said: "There was no religion mentioned and the movement was not sectarian - I even remember some Catholic children coming along after mass at St Mary's."
Pat Rogan attended the West Richmond Street Sunday School in the late 1920s said: "The good thing about the socialist Sunday school was that there was no Bible thumping. They gave us all the background to socialism but it wasn't hammered into us - it was treated in a very simple fashion”
Nellie Rogers, who also attended the Leith branch of the school, said although there was no religious content they were told that if such a person as Jesus Christ existed, he was "almost certainly a socialist".
"Thou Shalt Teach Revolution."
Yet another Socialist Sunday School movement was formed by Tom Anderson called ‘Proletarian Sunday Schools’ which were even further to the left of the S.S.S. and so eventually doomed to failure. Tom Anderson was a freethinker and trade union activist who joined the Independent Labour Party at its' inception in 1893 but later the Marxist inclined Social Democratic Federation and the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party breakaway from the SDF. In 1894 he had briefly set up a Socialist Sunday School on his own. It had faltered and he became involved, in 1896, in the wider Socialist Sunday School Movement as Superintendent of the Southside School. Anderson provided a Marxist input into a movement still dominated by Christian Socialist ethics. This input was not always appreciated and brought him frequent reproach. So much so that in 1910 Anderson, now in the SLP, set up the Socialist School. The specification of "Sunday" and the Christian ethos were both dropped and the talk was of teaching children "revolutionary socialism based on the materialist conception of history." In 1918 - after the Russian Revolution - Socialist Schools came under the umbrella of the "Proletarian School and College Movement." The Proletarian Schools and Colleges produced a magazine for young workers, "Red Dawn".
The End
In the late 1920s the movement began to decline. By 1935 there were only 34 schools affiliated to the National Council, mainly in Yorkshire and Scotland. They clung on after the Second World War, but were in terminal decline. The schools were renamed ‘The Socialist Fellowship’ in 1973, but due to a lack of adult support, the last traces of the movement were extinguished in Glasgow in 1980.
Why did it go into reverse? Many reasons can be suggested. One factor seems to have been the splits and conflict in the labour movement. The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920 with the aim of replacing the Labour Party while the old Independent Labour Party broke away from the Labour Party and both were at loggerheads with one another.
Questions were asked in parliament and the then Secretary for Scotland was asked whether he was aware that the teachers in such schools systematically debauch the minds of the children concerned with revolutionary propaganda and what steps would he take to prevent such disastrous perversion of the purposes of Sunday schools?
The Socialist Sunday Schools that sprung up in Edinburgh provoked such strong feelings that in 1925 the Evening News ran an article headlined "Socialist Sunday Schools: Stirred Up By The Devil." There were about eight in Edinburgh when the movement was at its height, with another three in the rest of the Lothians.
Betty McKenzie who went to the Leith school said: "There was no religion mentioned and the movement was not sectarian - I even remember some Catholic children coming along after mass at St Mary's."
Pat Rogan attended the West Richmond Street Sunday School in the late 1920s said: "The good thing about the socialist Sunday school was that there was no Bible thumping. They gave us all the background to socialism but it wasn't hammered into us - it was treated in a very simple fashion”
Nellie Rogers, who also attended the Leith branch of the school, said although there was no religious content they were told that if such a person as Jesus Christ existed, he was "almost certainly a socialist".
"Thou Shalt Teach Revolution."
Yet another Socialist Sunday School movement was formed by Tom Anderson called ‘Proletarian Sunday Schools’ which were even further to the left of the S.S.S. and so eventually doomed to failure. Tom Anderson was a freethinker and trade union activist who joined the Independent Labour Party at its' inception in 1893 but later the Marxist inclined Social Democratic Federation and the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party breakaway from the SDF. In 1894 he had briefly set up a Socialist Sunday School on his own. It had faltered and he became involved, in 1896, in the wider Socialist Sunday School Movement as Superintendent of the Southside School. Anderson provided a Marxist input into a movement still dominated by Christian Socialist ethics. This input was not always appreciated and brought him frequent reproach. So much so that in 1910 Anderson, now in the SLP, set up the Socialist School. The specification of "Sunday" and the Christian ethos were both dropped and the talk was of teaching children "revolutionary socialism based on the materialist conception of history." In 1918 - after the Russian Revolution - Socialist Schools came under the umbrella of the "Proletarian School and College Movement." The Proletarian Schools and Colleges produced a magazine for young workers, "Red Dawn".
The End
In the late 1920s the movement began to decline. By 1935 there were only 34 schools affiliated to the National Council, mainly in Yorkshire and Scotland. They clung on after the Second World War, but were in terminal decline. The schools were renamed ‘The Socialist Fellowship’ in 1973, but due to a lack of adult support, the last traces of the movement were extinguished in Glasgow in 1980.
Why did it go into reverse? Many reasons can be suggested. One factor seems to have been the splits and conflict in the labour movement. The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920 with the aim of replacing the Labour Party while the old Independent Labour Party broke away from the Labour Party and both were at loggerheads with one another.
The College Socialist Sunday School reports: “an unfortunate tendency on the part of some of the adult members to bring the ideological battles of the adult movement into the atmosphere of the School”.
And with the domination by the extreme Left, the Labour Party leadership had little time for Socialist Sunday Schools and its members were either mainstream church-goers or indifferent to religion and ideology alike. Socialist Sunday Schools became isolated in a backwater of the Labour movement. A possible deeper reason was that its semi-mystical appeal had been all but fatally discredited by the Great War. It was hard to believe that the world was ruled by the spirit of love when faced by the brutality of the Western Front, the rise of Fascism and the ‘Terror’ in Soviet Russia.
Another birthday card inscription.
We live in deeds, not years;
in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Across the ocean, too
In America the Socialist Sunday Schools also took root.
One Socialist Sunday School in New York State explains:
“The lessons are carefully worked out so that the class struggle is always before the children as the basis of the Socialist philosophy, and without the class struggle we would have no Socialist movement; always careful not to blind their young minds with any false conceptions of “justice, right etc., other than class justice. We show them that these words are used by reformers, and are meaningless to class conscious Socialists “
Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party of America wrote:
“The reason the workers of this and every other nation on earth are not in open revolt against the system that robs them is that the beneficiaries of capitalism control every avenue of information and education from the cradle to the grave. In schools, both public and private, the child of the worker is taught to revere the institutions of capitalism. All the institutions of capitalism, including the state, the church, the press, the schools, and even the places of amusement, conspire to poison the receptive mind of the child of the worker. The Socialist father and mother who neglects the opportunity offered in the Socialist Sunday School to checkmate this work of capitalism in the mind of the child neglects the noblest work in the entire field of Socialist propaganda. The hope of the future is in the child of today. Teach him the songs of the revolution, and, above all, teach him the revolutionary character of Jesus , the worker; teach him the religion of Love and Human Brotherhood; teach him to despise war and the fomenters of war. Inculcate in the mind of the child a love for and a pride in his class...
A Milwaukee’s Socialist Sunday School curriculum for 1917-1918 while America was in the midst of war was “cooperation in everyday life...When we are world citizens, all marching under the banner of international peaceful Socialism, our ignorant nationalistic boastfulness will give way to helpful and enlightened co-operation with other nations.”
The Socialist Ten Commandments
1. Love your school companions, who will be your co-workers in life.
2. Love learning, which is the food of the mind; be as grateful to your teachers as to your parents.
3. Make every day holy by good and useful deeds and kindly actions.
4. Honour good men and women; be courteous to all, bow down to none.
5. Do not hate nor speak evil of any one; do not be revengeful, but stand up for your rights and resist oppression.
6. Do not be cowardly. Be a good friend to the weak, and love justice.
7. Remember that all good things of the earth are produced by labour. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the workers.
8. Observe and think in order to discover the truth. Do not believe what is contrary to reason, and never deceive yourself or others.
9. Do not think that they who love their country must hate and despise other nations, or wish for war which is a remnant of barbarism.
10. Help to bring about the day when all nations shall live fraternally together in peace and prosperity [Look forward to the day when all men and women will be free citizens of one community, and live together as equals in peace and righteousness ILP version]
Declaration
We desire to be just and loving to all our fellow men and women, go to work together as brothers and sisters, to be kind to every kind of living creature and to help to form a New Society with Justice as its foundation and Love its Law.
The Verse Version
1. Always love your schoolmates
Make happy those in sorrow
The children of today will be
The citizens of tomorrow.
2. To parents and to teachers
Be grateful and be kind
For we should all love learning
(Which nourished the mind)
3. Let every day be holy
By doing some good deed;
To all do kindly actions
Whatever be their creed.
4. Be just and fair to all men,
Bow down or worship none.
Judge man by what he tried to do,
Or has already done.
5. Hate not, and speak no evil,
Stand up for what is right,
And do not be revengeful,
But 'gainst oppression fight.
6. Try not to be a coward,
But always help the weak,
Whatever path of life you're in.
For love and justice seek.
7. All good things gathered from the earth,
By toil of hand and brain,
Instead of going to the few,
The workers should retain.
8. Speak (the) truth at all times,
And try not to deceive,
And what opposes reason
We ought not to believe.
9. Love all the races of mankind,
Abolish war and strife;
That we may reach the higher plains
Of our intended life.
10. Look forward to the day when men
And women will be free;
As brothers and as sisters live
In peace and unity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Sunday_Schools
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