ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one small piece of this history. It examines a "lost" body of texts, used for explicitly counter-hegemonic purposes, in United States Socialist Sunday schools for children. This collection of school texts, published at the turn of the century, stood in essence "outside" what Raymond Williams has called the "selective tradition. Indeed, these curriculum materials were used to challenge the dominant, selective tradition of ideological values, beliefs, and meanings been promoted in our public schools and other social institutions. Sunday schools for working-class children were a part of the more general attempt by American socialists to forge a radical culture. The "critical lessons" of American socialists should perhaps be viewed from a vantage point, as hidden episodes of the past that may help to indicate possibilities for the future—possibilities of understandings, of activities, and, perhaps most important, of the human spirit.
