ABSTRACT
During the 1900–1920 period, American socialists not only critiqued and attempted to influence the nature of public school practice but also organized alternative educational activities for working-class adults and children. After describing some of the socialists’ main criticisms of public school instruction, this chapter focuses on a group of Sunday schools for children that were established and staffed by grass-roots American socialist activists. Attention is placed in particular on the nature of the curriculum that these schools adopted. The claim is made that these socialist educational efforts can be viewed as ‘outside’ the ‘selective tradition’ in three related ways: first, generally speaking, as a tradition of radical educational practice about which most of us are wholly unfamiliar; second, as an alternative social and educational perspective that in myriad ways has been directly ‘selected out’ of mainstream educational debate and practice; and third, as a concrete body of school knowledge that stands in contradistinction to the dominant messages of the public schools.
