Researching Foucault's Research: Organization and Control in Joseph Lancaster's Monitorial Schools

Abstract

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault describes how: `From the seventeenth century to the introduction, at the beginning of the nineteenth, of the Lancaster method, the complex clockwork of the mutual improvement school was built up cog by cog' (emphasis added). Foucault's genealogical explanation of how the mutual improvement school became a `machine for learning' is one of the main examples upon which his thesis of `disciplinary power' is built. However, Foucault's methodology, presenting a `genealogy' of the `essential techniques' on which disciplinary institutions are built, rather than to `write the history' of those institutions, results in relatively little case evidence being presented on key organizations cited in empirical support of his thesis. For example, by suggesting that the Lancaster Method represents the logical conclusion to the genealogy of mutual improvement techniques, he fails to offer any formal case evidence of Lancasterian policies and practices. This article therefore seeks to `research Foucault's research' by uncovering the distinctive organizational features of this paradigm `disciplinary institution', the Lancaster Method. We develop a case analysis of the educational philosophies of Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838) and explain how these were realized in the pedagogy and administration of his `monitorial' (or `British') schools. In so doing, we seek to deepen our understanding of `the architecture, anatomy, mechanics [and] economy of the disciplinary body'.