Joseph Lancaster

English educator

• Born: November 25, 1778
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 23, 1838
• Place of death: New York, New York

An advocate of mass education, Lancaster devised an intricate educational system that was economical and replicable, thus promoting its adoption by numerous countries.

Early Life

The names of Joseph Lancaster’s parents are unknown, but his father is known to have been a sieve maker and a soldier in the war against the American colonies. Both of Lancaster’s parents were Nonconformists who intended their son for the ministry. Lancaster’s own mystical bent appeared when he was very young. At the age of fourteen, he was compelled to walk to Bristol, intending to board a ship bound for Jamaica, where he hoped to “teach the poor blacks the word of God.” In Bristol, Lancaster realized that he was without funds to embark on a voyage, so, with characteristic impulsiveness, he instead joined the Royal Navy. After one voyage, he was released from his obligation through the intervention of friends. He left the ship after delivering an impassioned sermon to the crew.

Lancaster returned to London, where he soon joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which shared his avid interest in the education of the poor. He then served as an assistant schoolmaster at two schools before securing his father’s permission, in 1798, to bring home a few poor children to teach. As well as teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the young man often provided clothing and food for his students. Although his generosity was much appreciated by the children, it was not matched by prudence: Lancaster’s financial irresponsibility would be a leading cause of his later downfall.

Lancaster’s great enthusiasm and aptitude for teaching won for him many students, however, and in 1801, Lancaster rented a large room in Borough Road, a site that was to become internationally renowned as the home of the Lancasterian monitorial school system. Over the door he had inscribed:

All who will may send their children and have them educated freely, and those who do not wish to have education for nothing may pay for it if they please.

In an age in which the education of the poor was considered by the aristocracy to be dangerous, Joseph Lancaster not only championed the right to education for the masses but also devised an economical and coherent system that made such education possible.

Life’s Work

The Borough Road school proved so popular that young Lancaster soon had three hundred pupils. Turning to some Quaker philanthropists for aid, he was able to provide for some of his pupils’ material needs, but he still lacked funds to pay salaries for assistant teachers. He therefore adopted a strategy cited by several other previous and contemporary educators: the use of pupil-teachers, or monitors. Although Lancaster did not “invent” this system, he was responsible for popularizing it. His enthusiasm, his talent for fund-raising and public speaking, and his gift for meticulous systematizing (curious in an otherwise impulsive and extravagant person) quickly won for him many supporters.

Imbued with the nineteenth century’s faith in the goodness of technology, Lancaster brought the virtues of standardization, uniformity, and technology to the classroom. By employing monitors—older boys who taught younger ones—Lancaster could divide his three hundred students into groups of ten of roughly the same ability in a subject area (reading, writing, or arithmetic). Lessons were conducted in the manner of a spelling bee, with each group gathered in a semicircle around their monitor and each pupil competing to better his standing. This afforded direct attention and immediate reinforcement from the monitor—not possible in the traditional system in which the entire class recited lessons en masse to one teacher.

In the Lancasterian system, each pupil’s progress (or lack of it) was duly noted in meticulous logs kept by the monitors, who were also supposed to be learning according to the classical dictum “he who teaches learns.” The regimented system lent itself favorably to comparisons with the military and with factories, because each placed emphasis on the system rather than the individual: Monitors, like officers or machine parts, were replaceable in a smoothly running system. Because the system was easily copied, many monitors went out to establish their own schools elsewhere.

Lancaster’s fascination with efficient technology led him also to invent ingenious cost-cutting and time-saving devices and methods for his monitorial system of education. For example, he realized that the use of textbooks was inefficient, because only one page of the book could be used at one time, and by only one student. Therefore, he made large lesson cards on which to display each lesson. These could be read simultaneously by all ten boys in the group, and, because they were not handled except by the monitors, the cards would last indefinitely. Lancaster also invented time-saving routines for taking roll, checking on truants, and almost every other activity occurring in the school day.

In an age when students were often beaten for not learning their lessons, Lancaster’s psychology offered some improvement. Although whippings were still considered an option, he advised adherents of his system that even the most unruly child responds better to encouragement than to punishment. Thus, he devised an intricate system of rewards, wherein prizes could be won by the most accomplished students. (It should be noted that Lancaster also invented cages in which boys could be hung from the ceiling and advocated some other strategies that relied on humiliation for effectiveness. Although it may be argued that such tactics might be less cruel than corporal punishment, these ideas are also indicative of Lancaster’s increasing mental instability.)

One of the most important features of the Lancasterian system was its nondenominational religious training. Lancaster promoted “scriptural education,” which consisted solely of readings from the Scriptures without providing any doctrinal interpretations, thus encouraging individual interpretations, a practice advocated by Nonconformists and Quakers. At first, even the powerful Church of England supported this program, but this was to change as Lancaster’s monitorial schools met with increasing success.

By 1805, the twenty-six-year-old teacher was famous, having won the approval of George III and attracted international attention to his Borough Road School. Despite his increasing personal problems—he was deemed by some to be “thriftless, impulsive, extravagant, and sadly deficient in ordinary self-control”—Lancaster inspired many followers to begin Lancasterian schools elsewhere.

At this point, conservatives grew alarmed at Lancaster’s success. The Church of England and various conservative leaders attacked the Lancasterian system as an attempt to undermine the High Church by educating the masses with a neutral point of view about religion. Andrew Bell, who had established his own (earlier) form of monitorial school in India, was persuaded to come out of retirement to lead this opposition. The ensuing Bell-Lancaster controversy, which raged over the next twenty years, was centered on this difference in religious perspective. The fact that the debate really had its basis in politics is evident in the conservatives’ objections to an educated underclass. Bell wrote, “It is not proposed that the children of the poor be educated in an expensive manner, or even taught to write and to cypher.” Lancaster’s advocates denounced this as elitism, and Lancaster himself declared that he was precluded from offering an even more extensive curriculum by expense only.

Lancaster’s largess, devoid of prudence, quickly became a major problem. In 1807, a small group of benefactors had to step in to rescue him from his large debt. Recognizing signs of his increasing mental instability, they agreed in confidence that “the prudent management of J. L. was the first and great object” of their organization. In 1811, this group became the Royal Lancasterian Society, which solicited public funds and defended the movement from attack by the conservative Bellites, as well as promoting the movement abroad.

Although the Lancasterians dreamed of a national system of education, it was never to be in their homeland. The monitorial schools met with varying degrees of success in many foreign countries, however, including Ireland, France, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Russia, Greece, the West Indies, and various nations in Latin America.

By 1814, Joseph Lancaster’s shortcomings had overshadowed the strengths he had to offer his own educational movement. Burdened by a mentally ill wife and his own serious psychological problems—he was paranoid, deluded that he was being persecuted, even by those who most wanted to help him—Lancaster finally alienated even his most loyal supporters. He was “read out” (expelled) from the Society of Friends for his financial irresponsibility, and the British and Foreign School Society (previously the Royal Lancasterian Society) pressured him into resigning, following an incident in which he had apparently beaten some of his monitors for pleasure. As philanthropist Samuel Whitbread told Lancaster grimly, “If we have to choose between the man and the system, we shall save the system and reject the man.” Ironically, Lancaster’s success in creating an educational system in which individuals were replaceable had made him obsolete.

At only thirty-five years of age, Lancaster had passed the apex of his career and was destined for misfortune the rest of his life. Although he always commanded audiences wherever he went, his delusions of martyrdom precluded his being able to hold a position at monitorial schools in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Caracas, Trenton, or Montreal. Always inspired by visions of the great things he would do next, Lancaster was incapable of working responsibly in the present. His autobiographical sketch entitled Epitome of Some of the Chief Events and Transactions in the Life of Joseph Lancaster (1833) reveals the extent of his mental aberration. Still convinced of his persecution, he died in 1838 in were chosen, having been trampled by a runaway horse.

Significance

Joseph Lancaster himself was not a major figure in education, but he is notable for his good fortune in capturing the spirit of the age—the enthusiasm for the Industrial Revolution—in a manner that benefited the advocates of education for the masses. Whereas the opposers of public education cited exorbitant cost and unfeasibility as obstacles, Lancaster provided a systematized plan for the monitorial schools that was not only cheap but also relatively efficient. His genius lay in his ability to detail every aspect of the pedagogy so minutely that any follower could implement the system.

Although later generations derided the monitorial schools as being “factories,” the fact that they were efficient is evidenced in the presence of many Lancasterian elements in schools today, such as emphasis on discipline, routine, and pride in the school community.

The reliance on a chain of command, wherein authority lay in an office rather than a person, had both advantages and disadvantages. Advantages included the clarity of organization and the regularity of discipline, the individualized attention, and the psychological motivation provided by competition and prizes; the disadvantages included the damage done by any incompetent monitors and the rigidity of the teaching. These weaknesses were quickly identified and were in part responsible for the movement toward the professionalization of teaching in subsequent decades. Although Lancaster enjoyed personal acclaim only from 1804 to 1814, his monitorial school system continued to influence the rise of mass education internationally, until its decline during the 1840’s.

Bibliography

Cohen, Sol, ed. “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System (1805).” In Education in the United States: A Documentary History. Vol. 2, edited by Fred L. Israel and William P. Hansen. New York: Random House, 1974. Contains excerpts from Lancaster’s Improvements in Education, as It Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community (1803), affording a firsthand look at the educator’s philosophy, as well as his methods of teaching and discipline.

Fouts, Gordon E. “Music Instruction in Early Nineteenth-Century American Monitorial Schools.” Journal of Research in Music Education 22 (Summer, 1974): 112-119. Discusses the contributions of Bell and Lancaster to music education by describing Ezra Barratt’s fifty-six-page Sabbath School Psalmody, prepared expressly for use in monitorial schools.

Jones, Rufus M. The Later Periods of Quakerism. Vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 1921. Chapter 17, “Friends in Education,” provides brief biographies of Lancaster and other Quakers influential in the rise of public education.

Kaestle, Carl F., ed. Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement: A Documentary History. New York: Teachers College Press, 1973. An informative collection of documents, including excerpts from the writings of Joseph Lancaster, his advocates, and his detractors. Kaestle provides a lengthy and highly informative overview of the monitorial movement, the Bell-Lancaster controversy, and the international spread of the Lancasterian system in his introduction.

Rayman, Ronald. “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education, 1815-1838.” History of Education Quarterly (Winter, 1981): 395-409. Gives background on how Lancaster’s plan was seized as the most efficient way to achieve the white settlers’ goals of Indian education and cultural assimilation. The federally funded Brainerd School and the Choctaw Academy, supposedly model Lancasterian schools, soon abandoned any educational ideals in favor of manual labor. An extensive bibliography is included.

Read, Julie. “Working Class Hall of Fame Reopens.” Times Educational Supplement, no. 4288 (September 4, 1998). Discusses an exhibition in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, depicting and describing Lancaster’s educational system in detail.