One such from 'The Sydney Morning Herald' had the headline: "Presbyterian Assembly. Youth Welfare. Complaint of Insufficient Support" was dated 20th May, 1939.
The article starts off: "Indifference towards Sunday Schools and lack of financial support for the work of the welfare of Youth Council for the Presbyterian Church were complained of at the Presbyterian General Assembly yesterday.
'There is an apathy and an appalling indifference by parents in regard to the Sunday Schools,' said the Reverend George Nesbitt, chairman of the Welfare of Youth Councils."
Reverend Nesbitt was further quoted as commenting that parents may feel that Sunday School interferes with their own social engagements, and that although numbers attending Sunday School had increased slightly between 1937 and 1938, he hoped to quadruple the numbers of children attending in the near future.
My mother was very keen all of her life on teaching children the Gospel truths of Jesus and the Salvation message and this explains why this article would have interested her.
The message about the importance of Sunday Schools must have 'got through' to the community during the decade after the War; when I grew up in the 50s it was undoubtedly the 'Sunday School era' in suburban areas and country towns alike, for all Christian denominations.
Even other religions held religious classes for the children, and Jewish children of my acquaintance also attended lessons in 'Hebrew' and 'Biblical History' on a Sunday because it was considered 'work', and they allow no work to be done on a Saturday when the religious services are held at the Synagogues.
My own experience was with Baptist churches, I will use those as an example. There was a Sunday School Department where staff prepared a curriculum booklet for each school term. As a young boy at Canberra Baptist Church Sunday School, I regarded the Sunday School Exams as huge affairs with prize giving and State awards. I won a brand new Bible (King James version of course) for learning by heart the names in order of the Books of both the Old and New Testaments.
However, the Australian Sunday School movement waned in the 1970s and by the '80s it had largely fizzled. This trend has been the subject of much research.
Our society in some ways is very different from that of 1939. It is more diverse in the religious and cultural practices of the population (over 20% of whom have been born overseas or are children of those born overseas, increasingly from non-Anglo cultures); and it is more diverse in the activities that even traditional Christian Anglophiles wish to provide for their children.
More parents of both genders work longer hours, and the weekends are often precious either for 'consumerism' such as weekly shopping or special family activities, or for sport. In 1939, neither of these things were possible on a Sunday.
Some researchers have suggested that the Sunday School parents of the 50s and 60s were exhausted and/or that the children did not feel they gained benefit from their own Sunday School classes and didn't want for their children what was forced upon them.
Perhaps the most significant change was that the Sunday School movement itself grew 'inwards' and lost its appeal for children of parents who did not attend local churches. This continues in the main Protestant denominations today.
The American Evangelical Church movement of holding all age Sunday School for one hour prior to the church service never took off in Australia, although it continues to be a major part of USA churches. However, some evangelistic services are more informal than the Presbyterian service of 1939 would have been, and cater for the whole family, where the children can attend a parallel service called 'kid's church' rather than 'Sunday School'.
Traditionally, Sunday School classes (or the evangelistic 'kid's church') are generally held during the sermon time, so that those teaching (who are often the stalwarts of the congregation) never hear the sermon 'live', although many now get it on CD or as an ipod.
As I was considering the differences between the society of now and that of 1939, I was also considering how similar the problems are. Then, the clergy was trying to find a way to make Sunday School more attractive. It appears, with the successes of the 50s and 60s that they succeeded. Those 'solutions' are no longer appropriate today, and perhaps Christians need to get their collective heads together to find another way to manage the religious education of the youngsters of the next generation.