Joseph Lancaster

Joseph Lancaster (born November 25, 1778, London, England—died October 24, 1838, New York, New York, U.S.) was a British-born educator who developed the system of mass education known as the Lancasterian method, a monitorial, or “mutual,” approach in which brighter or more proficient children were used to teach other children under the direction of an adult. In the early 19th century the system, as developed by Lancaster, Andrew Bell, and Jean-Baptiste Girard, was widely used to provide the rudiments of education for numbers of poor children in Europe and North America.

Lancaster’s teaching career began in 1793, when he asked his father’s permission to bring some poor children home in order to teach them to read. Crowds of children came to him; since he couldn’t afford to hire extra teachers or assistants, he had the idea of making those pupils who knew a little more teach the others, and he devised a workable system to this effect. His school, his lectures, and his pamphlet Improvements in Education as It Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community (1803) attracted the attention of philanthropically minded people, and he felt encouraged to expand the school and to found others. But he proved to be vain, rash, and extravagant and soon fell heavily into debt. Friends of the school paid his creditors, became trustees of the school, and organized the Royal Lancasterian Institution, later known as the British and Foreign School Society (1810). Lancaster’s techniques for mass teaching spread rapidly, and there were soon about 30,000 pupils being taught in 95 Lancasterian schools.

Meanwhile, Lancaster severed his connections with his original school and opened a new secondary-level boarding school, which soon ended in bankruptcy. In 1818 he emigrated to the United States, where his work had already sparked public education movements in Albany, N.Y., Boston, and Philadelphia, among other major U.S. cities. Nothing, however, came of Lancaster’s own projects in the United States, and so he welcomed an invitation from Simón Bolívar to move to Venezuela in 1825. He quarreled with the Latin American leader and returned north in 1827, spending the last decade of his life in Canada and the United States making various experiments with his system.

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In Lancaster’s monitorial system, from 200 to 1,000 pupils were gathered in one room and seated in rows, usually of 10 pupils each. The adult schoolmaster taught the monitors, or prefects, each of whom relayed the lesson to his own row. Besides monitors who taught, there were monitors who took attendance, who examined and promoted pupils, and who prepared or distributed writing slates and books. Schoolroom activity proceeded with military precision, according to directions laid down by Lancaster and from which even the slightest deviations were not permitted. The defect of this system was that in order to achieve mass results and mass economies the schoolmaster was relegated to the position of a bystander, learning was reduced to drill and memorization, and the curriculum was reduced to particles of information and rote sequences. The whole process of teaching and learning was thus routinized and formalized to a point at which opportunities for creative thinking and initiative scarcely existed. Nevertheless, the adoption and subsequent rejection of Lancaster’s innovations spurred the demand for nonsectarian education.