The English Sunday school movement is usually associated with Robert Raikes of Gloucester (1735-1811), the founder of the Sunday School Union. From 1782 Raikes established classes, often on Saturdays as well as Sundays, for children of the poor who were in employment for the rest of the week. A century after the movement began, over 5 million children in England were attending these schools.

Before the advent of "Sunday Schools", the earliest mandate for education of children was passed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. (1) Notably, a sizable portion of this education program was religious in nature. Some of the cultural/ religious motives behind this mandate to educate the children was a fear that "evil" doctrines, unorthodox knowledge and a general lack of knowledge of the (Biblical) scriptures prevailed, so it pressed the colonial government to " order that an elementary school be established for every town of 50 families." (CT followed in 1650) (2, 3)

In Europe the Dutch Reformed Church had been providing religious schooling for youth since 1618 in the Netherlands and elsewhere. (4) The Colonies did not have "Sunday School" for children for nearly a century after the Pilgrims landed and founded Plymouth.

As the New England Colonies grew and expanded into the frontier, new towns were created. With the formation of a town also automatically came the formation of an ecclesiastical society with a minister in place. In 1731 various folk were given permission to gather and worship together and from that gathering in 1733 at the geographic center of Plymouth County and on the county's highest point the church and town of Halifax was begun. Each spring some of the men of the church would assist the pastor in teaching the children the catechism ( 5) and this continued yearly into 1746 and further. On April 25, 1746, during the pastorate of Rev. John Cotton (1734-1754) a vote was taken to organize and teach the children of the town and form a Sunday School.

Sunday school societies played important parts in the schools' proliferation. The American Sunday School Union, a cross-denominational national organization founded in Philadelphia in 1824, was the largest of these, publishing curricular materials and children's books and sponsoring missionaries to remote regions. Denominational agencies, such as the Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Union (1827) and the Sunday School Board of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1884), followed suit. After the Civil War, denominational interests came into increasing conflict with the American Sunday School Union, especially in the area of teacher training and lesson writing. Gradually, denominational organizations and teachers' conventions became the organizations of choice, and the American Sunday School Union's preeminence declined. It was at a national Sunday school teachers' convention in 1872 that delegates and publishers adopted plans for a systemof "uniform lessons," standardizing the Biblical texts studied each week but permitting each denomination to shape the lessons' contents. And the origins of the Chautauqua Movement idea can be traced to a Sunday school teachers' summer institute organized by the Methodist bishop John Heyl Vincent in 1873.

In the twentieth century, Sunday schools were primarily church institutions, recruiting the next generations of members. Although teaching remained volunteer labor performed mostly by women, the work of managing became professionalized, many congregations hired directors of religious education, and new agencies took on the tasks of multiplying the number of Sunday schools and shaping teachers' preparation.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, Sunday school attendance had declined overall. Nevertheless, Sunday schools remain a significant institutional tool for the religious training of succeeding generations, as many a child could testify.