Dear Editor,

I read with interest Sean Graham’s recent reflections on the history of Sunday School and its contribution to Jamaican education, published in this newspaper on February 17 in a letter to the editor entitled ‘Sunday School’s vital contribution to Jamaican society’. His central point — that Sunday School played a formative role in literacy and moral development — is correct and worthy of recognition. However, an important historical distinction deserves clarification.

The Sunday School movement that emerged in late 18th-century England under the leadership of Robert Raikes was not merely a supplementary religious programme. It was, in fact, a practical literacy system created precisely because poor and working children — and later enslaved children in the Caribbean — laboured six days a week and were only free on Sundays. Churches, therefore, used that single free day to teach reading, writing, basic arithmetic, and moral instruction, primarily through the
Bible and hymnals.

The rise of Sunday School was made possible not only by Christian compassion but by the earlier invention of the printing press, which placed affordable Bibles and learning materials into the hands of ordinary people for the first time. These printed scriptures became the primary tools through which churches taught poor and working-class children to read, laying the foundation for mass literacy long before public education systems emerged.

When missionaries brought Sunday Schools to Jamaica, they were initially established to educate enslaved and poor children who had no access to weekday schooling. These early Sunday Schools functioned as the island’s first mass classrooms and became the seedbed from which regular elementary and mission schools later developed. In this sense, Sunday School did not simply support education — it effectively preceded and gave birth to Jamaica’s primary education system.

After Emancipation and the expansion of weekday mission schools and elementary education, Sunday School gradually evolved into the devotional and character-formation programme most Jamaicans recognise today, with less emphasis on the traditional “three Rs” of reading, writing, and arithmetic. While still invaluable spiritually, its academic role had largely shifted into the formal school system.

This historical progression matters because it highlights the Church’s pioneering role in mass education long before government-run schooling existed. Sunday School was not originally an enrichment activity; it was the first educational lifeline for children denied learning during the workweek.

Recognising this fuller history deepens our appreciation of Sunday School’s legacy — not only as a moral institution, but also as the foundation upon which Jamaica’s primary education system was built.

Dudley McLean II

dm15094@gmail.com