THE LANCASTER SYSTEM: AN
ALTERNATIVE TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
by John
Chodes
Public education has failed. It
often produces illiterate, spiritless graduates who have neither
the motivation nor the skills to find a good job or succeed. As a
result, private sector schooling is growing by leaps and bounds.
Unfortunately, these private schools are associated with small,
localized efforts or elitism and high tuition.
There was however, a private
enterprise system in the 19th century which taught millions of
poor kids around the world for a few dollars a year. It was called
"The Lancaster System". It encouraged children to develop personal
initiative and responsibilities. Students worked at adult jobs
within the schools and got paid for them. They learned to read and
write in months instead of years.
The Lancaster System was also
controversial and revolutionary because it caused considerable
social upheaval by enabling the poor to break down traditional
class and economic barriers with their new skills. The Lancaster
idea may offer a clue to the way out of the mess we are in
today.
Joseph Lancaster was born in the
slums of London in 1778. As a young Quaker, he experienced the
sting of religious discrimination. His family's faith barred him
from attending the schools for the poor run by the Church of
England. So his father taught him at home. Embittered by this
painful memory, by age 18 he was instructing London urchins in his
father's attic, for a penny a lesson.
He was soon deluged with hundreds
of students. With so many pupils and limited resources, Lancaster
had to devise radical methods to make ends meet. This is how the
"monitorial" idea was born. It delegated to the students the
responsibility for teaching and doing the paperwork. The better
students taught the slower. When the slower developed, they became
monitors. There was one teaching monitor for every 10 students.
There were other monitorial positions that involved many of the
students and spread prestige and responsibilities
around.
One monitor would assign new
students to a class. Another would keep track of absenses. When a
student made progress, a monitor would promote him. Another made
or molded pens. Another was in charge of distributing writing
slates. A "monitor-general" was in charge of all the
others.
This kind of student interaction
&endash; teaching and learning from their peers - eliminated
boredom. Lancaster wrote: "A school, governed by such order,
exhibits a scene of wonder to visitors, and happiness among the
children, which baffles the power of description.'
Under this system, there was little
for the adult headmaster to do except organize, reward, punish and
inspire. Lancaster's schools did not need a harsh master, for they
were governed almost automatically. "The master should be a silent
bystander because the system and not the master's vague or
uncertain judgement will be in practice," Lancaster said. "In a
common school, the authority of the master is personal and the rod
is his sceptor. His absence brings riot and confusion. In his
absence his assistants will rarely be minded. Under my plan, the
master leaves and business goes on aslusual because the authority
is not personal."
His method was unique, fast and
effective. "I continually made experiments," Lancaster later
recalled. "1,000 children could be taught in one schoolroom under
the care of one master and a great proportion of them finish their
education in 12 months. That education comprising the art of
reading, writing and arithmetic." beyond the 3R's, his schools
also emphasized geometry, algebra, trigonometry, religion and
languages.
In seeking to motivate his
students, Lancaster stumbled on to a method that brought out their
entrapreneurial spirit and taught them how to deal with money.
This was no small matter, since all this took place in the early
stages of the industrial revolution. Most of the students and
their parents had rarely dealt directly with cash.
Lancaster awarded "Merit Badges"
for various accomplishments. These small paper tickets, much like
Green Stamps in contemporary America. Like trading stamps, the
merit badges were worth little individually but had considerable
value when redeemed in bulk. They could purchase toys, children's
books, pens, purses and clothing.
Merit badges were also used to
borrow books from a library monitor. This job was a "concession."
It was a bonanza for that monitor. Other students often bid to
purchase the concession with their accumulated merit badges.
Through this process they learned about the dynamics of buying and
selling in a real marketplace.
Entrapreneurial themes dominated
Lancaster's ideas. Adult teachers in Lancaster schools had part of
their income created by class attendence. Thus a teacher became a
salesman and promoter of the system to bring in more pupils.
Anyone who could pay the few shillings a year was welcome,
including girls. No other system at that time had accepted them on
an equal basis with boys.
Lancaster's cost-cutting
experiments brought the cost of education down to a fraction of
what it cost competing church or private schools. For instance,
students wrote on slate instead of paper. Paper was expensive,
slate indestructible. To save money on books, one per subject per
class was used.
Each page was separated, placed on
a stand, then the class was broken up into groups of 10. Each
group gathered around one stand and studied that one page as a
lesson. The groups would then rotate so that each one had access
to all the lessons.
Lancaster even designed
prefabricated buildings that could be assembled in days. This was
truly mass-produced education. Soon the system was self-sustaining
by charging as little as 4 shillings a year.
Joseph Lancaster was a zealot,
which was both a source of strength and weakness. He believed his
system would revolutionize society by eradicating illiteracy,
therefore ending poverty. To propagate his ideas, he wrote a book,
"The Lancasterian System of Education," and printed several
thousand copies. he lectured all over the world, giving away
copies to anyone who professed an interest in starting a school
based on his plan.
During 1808 to 1810, in an era of
slow carriages and slower boats, Lancaster made 16 missionary
journeys, traveling 6,837 miles, delivering 141 lectures and
established 95 schools for 25,000 children.
Lancaster was a great salesman but
terrible at business. Although he earned huge lecture fees, he
gave much of it away to sincere or not-so-sincere audience members
who said they needed seed money to implement his plan. He also
liked to live well, which was at odds with his pious Quaker
background. Robert Dale Owen, the famed social reformer wrote that
Lancaster was "a strange mixture of honest self-sacrificing zeal
and imprudent self-indulgent ostentation." Later in his life this
trait would come back to haunt him.
His major break toward national
fame came when the aristocrat, Lord Somerville, attended a class
and quickly became a backer in 1803. Somerville told others what
he had seen and soon "foreign princes, ambassadors, peers,
commoners, ladies of distinction, bishops and archbishops, Jews
and Turks, all visited the schools with wonder-waiting
eyes."
This ferment reached King Gqorge
III, who granted an audience to Lancaster. "I have sent for you to
give me an account ~f your system of education. You say one master
teaches 500 children at the same time? How do you keep them in
order, Lancaster?" the King asked. Lancaster described the
monitorial system. The King was amazed. "I highly approve of your
system, and it is my wish that every poor child in my dominions
should be taught to read....I will do anything you wish to promote
this object." King George promised 100 pounds annually, from his
own funds, not the state's.
This modest patronage transformed a
growing private business into a national institution. But in the
end it proved fatal, since it aroused defenders of the Church of
England to active opposition. To his critics, Lancaster was a
dangerous radical intent on creating a social revolution. Teaching
the "unwashed masses" to read and write and self-reliance made it
possible for them to crack the traditional class
barriers.
His most severe critic was the
well-known writer, Sarah Trimmer. She warned that Lancaster's
emphasis on merit, not class, might lead to the day when children
"accustomed to consider themselves nobles of a school, may, in
their future lives, from a conceit of their own trivial
merits...aspire to be nobles of the land, and to take the place of
the hereditary nobility."
Lancaster's opponents soon turned
to championing a rival edu~ational method, the "Madras" system of
a Scottish clergyman, Andrew Bell. This system, while it relied on
monitors, taught neither self-reliance or entrapreneurship. Bell
had discovered his variation of the monitorial idea while on duty
as an army chaplain in colonial Madras, India. He was in charge of
an orphanage of Untouchable children. No adult would dare to teach
these social outcasts. Bell, out of necessity, taught them to
teach themselves.
But Bell's method reinforced all
the neatives of the class barriers. "In utopian schemes for the
universal diffusion of general knowledge," Bell said, "there is a
risk of elevating those who are doomed to the drudgery of daily
labor above their station, and rendering them unhappy and
discontented in their lot."
The Church of England, in promoting
the Madras system to eliminate Lancaster's schools, used the same
tactics that many modern retailers or fast-food chains use against
one another. Wherever Lancaster opened a school, the church opened
one of its own directly across the street. Backed by huge
construction funds from Parliament, the tactic succeeded.
Gradually the Church of England split Lancaster's market and,
step-by-step, pirated all his students.
In 18O5 the Lancaster System
reached the United States. Eventually there would be more
monitorial schools here than in England. Yet, for enthusiasts of
private schooling, the storylof Lancaster's rise and fall in
America is more depressing than its demise across the ocean.
Particularly in New York State, government involvement via
subsidies marred the system almost from the beginning.
In 1805 the prominant
philanthropists, Thomas Eddy and John Murray formed "The Society
for Establishing a Free School in the City of New York." Its
purpose was to educate poor children who were ineligible for
instruction by the various church-sponsored schools. Benjamin
Perkins, the group's Secretary, knew Lancaster and had seen his
operation in England, and recommended it. Within a year the Free
School Society (FSS) was incorporated and the first classes were
held in Manhattan, with monitors as teachers.
One of the Lancaster system's most
powerful American friends was DeWitt Clinton. He was one of the
most important political figures of the era, being a ten-time
mayor of New York City and also the governor of the
state.
Clinton was an early member of the
Free School Society. Upon his request, the New York State
legislature granted the FSS a $4,000 subsidy to construct a
building and another ~1,000 for expenses. The money came from a
tiny liquor and tavern tax, so the general public was not yet
affected.
By 1818, three schools, teaching
thousands of New York's poor, were in operation. DeWitt Clinton
was now Governor. State-funded construction of five more schools
was planned, which called for a wider tax. This one was imposed on
real estate.
That same year Joseph Lancaster was
invited to New York and Washington D.C. The mayor and DeWitt
Clinton officially received him. He was treated like royalty when
he visited the U.S. House of Representatives, which created a
resolution honoring Lancaster as a "friend of learning and of
man."
Soon New York State moved from
subsidizing the Free School Society to managing it by legislating
a general education tax which gave it the revenue to build new
schools and to admit children of all economic levels. by the
1840's 98 schools taught 25,000 pupils annually under the
Lancaster plan.
Then came the coup-de-grace for the
ESS as a private system. As a closed corporation subsidized by the
state, it came under fire. John Spencer, the Secretary of New York
State, charged that the FSS had "acquired control of the system of
public education; and the ta~payers, who contribute to this fund,
have no voice in the selection of those who administer the
system."
Spencer quickly extended the
state's authority by creating the now-famous Board of Education to
control the FSS. By 1852 it was completely absorbed by this
bureaucracy, the cost of schooling quadrupled, taxes rose
dramatically and the quality of education declined as the
government now had a monopoly on education. Joseph Lancaster's
great private system was dead but before it expired, 700,000
students in New York City had been taught by monitors.
Fortunately for Lancaster, he did
not live to see its end. After coming to America he settled with
his fellow Quakers in Philadelphia. But rumors about his
profligate life-style and huge debts followed him from England, so
that the pious Quakers shunned him. He was forced to wander from
city to city, then Canada, and South America, briefly staying with
friends before drifting on.
In October 1838, while in New York
City to give a lecture, Joseph Lancaster was run over by a
horse-drawn beer wagon, just a block away from one of his schools.
He died. He was 59 years old.
Shortly before his death he
bitterly wrote: "Politicians have purposely interfered in what was
originally a work of pure benevolence; and though they could
neither corrupt or command the fountain, they have contaminated
the stream."
John Chodes is a free-lance writer
who specializes in the subject of education. His articles on this
subject have appeared in The New York Times, Reason, The Freeman,
Chronicles and many other publications as well as TV and radio
editorial replies.
From the author:
SKOLE
The Journal of Alternative
Education
Mary Leue, Editor
72 Philip Street
Albany, NY 12202-1729
Dear Ms. Leue:
I believe the enclosed article,
"The Lancaster System: An Alternative to Public Schools', would be
of value to your publication. The appropriate information is on
the back of each illustration. My credentials are at the end of
the essay.
411 East 10th Street
#22-G
New York, NY 10009
212-677-4917
Social Security
No:103-32-6471
First Serial Rights
No. of words: 2,100
Picture shows a monitor teaching a
group of his peers. They stand in a semi-circle about him. One
page of a textbook is placed on a stand before them. When the
students have completed studying that page, they move to another
semi-circle where they study another page.
Students showing their writing
slates to a monitor. Slates were used because they were
indestructible, while paper was expensive.
Ground plan of a Lancaster school,
demonstrating how 1,000 students could be taught in one room at
one time. Each dot represents a student. Some are seated at the
long benches at the center, writing. The rest are divided into
small groups along the semi-circles, reciting.
