Sunday school is credited to a specific person and a specific year. Robert Raikes, a newspaper publisher in Gloucester, England, organized a school in 1780 to teach poor working children to read, using the Bible as the reading text, meeting on the one day those children were not at work. Literacy, not doctrine, was the immediate goal: many of the children who attended worked six days a week in the citys pin factories and had no other opportunity for schooling at all.
The model spread with striking speed. Within a few decades Sunday schools operated across Britain and were carried to North America, becoming closely bound up with the broader movement for popular literacy in the English speaking world, run largely by volunteer teachers and funded by local subscription rather than by any central church authority. For much of the early nineteenth century a Sunday school was as likely to be teaching a child the alphabet as it was to be teaching a catechism.
That combined role narrowed over the following century. As government run schools took over general literacy education across Britain, North America and eventually much of the rest of the world, the specifically educational half of the Sunday school original purpose became redundant, and the institution that remained was religious instruction alone, delivered in age graded classes alongside or instead of the main congregational service.
It remains a standard feature of congregational life in many Protestant churches today, and in adapted forms within other Christian traditions, though attendance has declined sharply across much of Western Europe and North America even as comparable programs continue to grow in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.