I’ve been to sunday school, at several churches, when I was a child. I also “taught” sunday school when I was a teenager. In all cases, it was a glorified daycare blessed with the halo effect of God: a way to make parents feel virtuous about leaving their kids somewhere for an hour on Sunday while they have coffee and cookies. This was perhaps valuable as parental stress relief, but it wasn’t a particularly great thing for the people actually in sunday school. If anything, it was kind of boring, and got everybody fidgety from being cooped up in a room.
So, yeah, if you’re looking for things to do with children on a Sunday morning, may I suggest hiking, or reading, or playing somewhere, or anything but sunday school? It’s not horrible, but I would characterize it as intensely meh.
Training kids to tolerate intensely meh experiences, especially when there’s no obvious gain from them, may be unhealthier than is obvious. At least in my case, I think it’s done a lot to build a habit of killing time.
I’ve been to sunday school, at several churches, when I was a child. I also “taught” sunday school when I was a teenager. In all cases, it was a glorified daycare blessed with the halo effect of God: a way to make parents feel virtuous about leaving their kids somewhere for an hour on Sunday while they have coffee and cookies. This was perhaps valuable as parental stress relief, but it wasn’t a particularly great thing for the people actually in sunday school. If anything, it was kind of boring, and got everybody fidgety from being cooped up in a room.
So, yeah, if you’re looking for things to do with children on a Sunday morning, may I suggest hiking, or reading, or playing somewhere, or anything but sunday school? It’s not horrible, but I would characterize it as intensely meh.
Training kids to tolerate intensely meh experiences, especially when there’s no obvious gain from them, may be unhealthier than is obvious. At least in my case, I think it’s done a lot to build a habit of killing time.