Performance / Tam Dean Burn - ‘A Partial History of the Proletarian Sunday Schools’ (2012).
A one-off performance by actor Tam Dean Burn inspired by the life of Tom Anderson, founder of Glasgow’s Proletarian Sunday School, followed by a presentation on the history of Anderson and the School by Jane Rosen, a social historian and specialist in working class children’s literature.
'The Glasgow Schools' is a project by artist Ruth Ewan. It maps out the city’s Proletarian, Socialist Sunday and Socialist Fellowship Schools, part of a network of alternative educational organisations that once spread across the UK, of which Glasgow was a particular centre.
The schools explored a spectrum of left-wing ideologies with children and young adults, from the Marxist revolutionary zeal of Tom Anderson’s Proletarian Schools (1918 – c1939) to the Christian leaning ethics of the early Socialist Sunday Schools (1896 – 1965), which later evolved into the Socialist Fellowship (1965 – 1980).
