American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive Era: The Socialist Sunday School

Abstract

Described by one unsympathetic observer in Buffalo as Schools of Nonsense and by one ardent participant in Milwaukee as rebel factories, the movement to establish Socialist Sunday schools (S.S.S.) in the United States during the early twentieth century is perhaps one of the best kept secrets of American socialist and educational historiography.' This essay attempts to rectify that situation by analyzing an educational movement that falls outside of the traditional and progressive educational camps of the early 1900s. During these years numerous working-class radicals provided their children with a formal, weekend education that lacked the strong capitalistic biases dominant in the public schools. The Socialist Sunday schools represent the most obvious, formal, and widespread educational activity for children ever undertaken by American Socialists. The development of these schools testified to the activism of grassroots radicals who flourished during an era of progressive change. Moreover, their efforts are particularly noteworthy in light of the theoretical writings of Antonio Gramsci, in particular his Prison Notebooks of 1929 to 1935. Gramsci's formulation of the war of position, in which working-class institutions and culture gradually surround the bourgeois State apparatus with a counter hegemony, and of the importance of the working-class creating its own organic intellectuals, gives to this fledgling, ultimately unsuccessful Sunday school movement added historical and theoretical significance.2 Whichever view one takes-that they taught nonsense or rebellion-the Socialist Sunday schools deserve serious attention as among the