I HAVE only vague memories of attending Sunday School as a child. It obviously didn't leave much of a spiritual imprint, although perhaps that's because all I ever did was draw crayon recreations of Noah's Ark. I also remember being told some charmin
g fables about gentle Jesus, who seemed like ever such a nice man. Forever helping others and dishing out friendly advice, he was like a sort of idealised guidance teacher, right down to the beard and sandals. It all seems rather sweet and innocent in retrospect, and in a way it's a shame I grew up to be a Satanist.
It's difficult to believe that there was a time when these harmless God-nurseries were considered a subversive threat to the very fabric of British society. According to Huw Edwards, host of Sunday Schools: Reading, Writing and Redemption, the British ruling classes of the late 19th century feared that, by teaching working-class children how to read and write, the Sunday School movement was stoking the flames of a potential revolt. It's all very well being able to read the Bible, but what if these kids got hold of the radical political texts that were then becoming increasingly available? As absurd as it seems today, there was talk in parliament of abolishing them.
The initiative blossomed, however, and by the mid-19th century Sunday Schools – some of them housed in factory-sized buildings – were everywhere. By this time they were viewed as a useful way of teaching practical skills to children on the one day when they weren't supposed to be working. Although it eventually evolved into something more benevolent, there's no doubt that the movement was founded upon an uneasy mixture of good intentions and exploitative condescension.
Nevertheless, Edwards acted throughout as an enthusiastic cheerleader for this virtually lost tradition. Without the guiding hand of these schools, he argued, millions of underprivileged Victorian children wouldn't have received any education at all, even if it was for only one day a week. Perhaps, but there was something gratingly evangelical and unquestioning about Edwards' appraisal, which is probably only to be expected when a man of faith pays tribute to a tool of God (a bit like Aled Jones paying tribute to Cliff Richard, say).
And yet I can't dispute the evidence that Sunday Schools were once a popular and influential facet of British life. As to the question of why, even as relatively recently as the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of children continued to attend them, the answer was simple: because they were friendly, encouraging and fun. It's hard to be cynical when faced with such fond testimonials, even if they did come from celebrity alumni such as Ann Widdicombe. Taking aside the fact that Edwards' main complaint was basically, "why must things change?", this was still a sporadically enlightening social history lesson.
While it's true that series two of Heroes took far too long to get going, the last few episodes eventually succeeded in restoring some of its enjoyably melodramatic momentum. The finale climaxed in true Heroes style with a multitude of cliff-hangers: the most shocking was flying politician Nathan Petrelli being gunned down at a press conference, although I should've know that something would go awry as soon as he called the thing in the first place: press conferences nearly always end badly in shows like this.
If you analyse Heroes too closely, it's actually complete rubbish. Naturally, I'll be back for more next year.
The full article contains 598 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
