Monitorial Schools Research Articles

Monitors and moralists: the Lancasterian system of mutual education and the vision of a new moral order in Spanish America, 1818–1831

ABSTRACTSpanish American independence leaders acted as both monitors and moralists for their emerging nations. Their adoption of the Lancasterian monitorial school system, along with their efforts to legislate new republican moral codes, revealed the contradictions that led to the failure of so many of that idealistic generation’s dreams. They could not broaden literacy without opening avenues of expression to those new voices and thereby relinquishing some measure of control. They could not make a place for lower classes, women or indigenous people in their programmes and rhetoric, without jeopardising their own privileged position. They could not quite determine how to encourage individual freedom while maintaining public order. The widespread introduction of the Lancasterian monitorial school system along with new moral codes for behaviour suggests that these elites had a revolutionary plan to refashion their society, but were also deeply conservative in their desire to make the rest of the citizenry more like themselves.

Shapes and Spaces: Inside Joseph Lancaster's "Monitorial" Laboratory

In this article I examine the nature of discipline in the monitorial school. Recognizing that much post-Discipline and Punish research has concentrated on contemporary educational institutions, I return to Lancaster's original school model not simply to identify the presence of discipline, but to describe its function. In other words I define what discipline is. Particular attention is paid to the architecture of the school, showing how the design of the school room operates to discipline and place the pupil. I also examine in detail two engravings that appear in Lancaster's treatise, The British System of Education (1810) in order to suggest that an identifiable anxiety underlies his ostensible confidence in the monitorial system. Finally, I look at the influence which the British monitorial school had on its North American counterpart and advance theories for the system's failure.

モニトリアル・スクールは近代学校の原型か? : 「クラス」と「一斉教授」について再考する(報告,シンポジウム・学級の思想)

モニトリアル・スクールは近代学校の原型か? : 「クラス」と「一斉教授」について再考する(報告,シンポジウム・学級の思想)

The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Victorian Schoolroom

Abstract This article examines the vocality of teachers and schoolchildren in nineteenth-century English education discourse. Drawing on Andrew Bell’s model of the monitorial schools of the early nineteenth century, as well as the annual reports of the school inspectorate for the Committee of Council on Education, the article investigates the disaggregation of vocal sound and linguistic meaning in speech training and reading instruction in the writing of the mass schoolroom. Of particular interest is the development of notions of the teacher’s voice as a potentially powerful vehicle for the development of moral selfhood. Children’s speaking voices were understood as crucial indices of an effective pedagogy, something which the Revised Code of 1862 simultaneously enshrined and misrecognized.

Para “desnacionalizar” la historia de la educación: reflexiones en torno a la difusión mundial de la escuela lancasteriana en el primer tercio del siglo XIX

Este artí­culo constituye un estudio sobre la dimensión global de la escuela lancasteriana y su difusión en Hispanoamérica en el primer tercio del siglo XIX. Haciendo referencia a los resultados de una serie de investigaciones previas, discuto explí­citamente algunos marcos analí­ticos de la historia global y varias aproximaciones teórico-metodológicas para estudiar el nivel supranacional en la historia de la educación: las teorí­as neoinstitucionalistas de la "cultura mundial", la teorí­a de la externalización, el análisis de redes, los relatos de difusión-recepción-apropiación, así­ como la crí­tica poscolonial y subalterna sobre la multidireccionalidad y la co-construcción de los fenómenos globales. Argumento que el estudio de la esfera supranacional no puede basarse en la suma de las historias nacionales, sino que amerita perspectivas y metodologí­as propias, de un nivel analí­tico macro, e invito a los historiadores de la educación a considerar la dimensión supranacional de los objetos de estudio locales, regionales y nacionales.

Southey’s “New System”: the monitorial controversy and the making of the “entire man of letters”

This essay reads Southey’s repeated writings between 1806 and 1812 on the "monitorial method" of education, and the religious-political controversy over its invention and application. I suggest that this repetitive writing provides insights into Southey's career, as well as wider issues of Romantic historicism, originality, authorial integrity, and system. The first section considers Southey’s associative style, and his connection between the use of humiliating punishments in Joseph Lancaster’s monitorial schools and the threat of domestic revolution. The second section reads Southey’s support for Lancaster's rival Andrew Bell as part of his search for a systematic basis for the pro-war and anti-Catholic terms of his conservatism, in the context of the periodical culture-wars between the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Review. Section three then explores Southey’s changing position in the Bell-Lancaster controversy in the light of his “art of historical book-keeping,” and suggests a contorted literary consistency behind the alleged political “apostasy.” The coda reflects on the contrast of system and style between Southey and Coleridge, and their diverging visions of education and the "national church.”

Exposure to the eyes of God: monitorial schools and Evangelicals in early nineteenth‐century England

Through a close analysis of the links between nineteenth‐century Protestant missionary thought and the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) this article suggests that to distinguish Enlightenment educational and social reform from evangelism is mistaken. Emblematic of the social reform projects which emerged in England as responses to the challenges of the French Revolution and rapid urbanisation, the BFSS was the outgrowth of Joseph Lancaster’s efforts at spreading the method of education he pioneered, the monitorial system, throughout the British Isles and, ultimately, the world. Despite the strong association between the BFSS and various utilitarian thinkers, evangelicals of late‐eighteenth and early‐nineteenth‐century England came to view the Society and the monitorial system as means by which to integrate all the peoples of the world into the Lord’s dominion. Becoming part of that dominion entailed subjecting oneself to constant moral scrutiny, and monitorial schools were regarded as a means by which to ensure such self‐examination. In short, missionaries seized upon monitorial schools because their aims were parallel to those of educational reformers in the metropole. Where home reformers aimed at the normalisation of the body of English political subjects, the development of the English social body, missionary reformers aimed at the normalisation of the body of God’s children.

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

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'.

Shapes and Spaces: Inside Joseph Lancaster's "Monitorial" Laboratory

In this article I examine the nature of discipline in the monitorial school. Recognizing that much post-Discipline and Punish research has concentrated on contemporary educational institutions, I return to Lancaster's original school model not simply to identify the presence of discipline, but to describe its function. In other words I define what discipline is. Particular attention is paid to the architecture of the school, showing how the design of the school room operates to discipline and place the pupil. I also examine in detail two engravings that appear in Lancaster's treatise, The British System of Education (1810) in order to suggest that an identifiable anxiety underlies his ostensible confidence in the monitorial system. Finally, I look at the influence which the British monitorial school had on its North American counterpart and advance theories for the system's failure.

Early Nineteenth Century School Space and Ideology

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in response to the problems of the early industrial revolution and the consequent rapid urbanisation, a variety of school types arose to offer some kind of education to urban workers' children. The chief types were the Sunday, monitorial, infant and workhouse schools. The illustrated paper describes how, in each of these, space was organised to produce relations between individual children, groups of children and teachers based on a strong ideological base of religion, order, surveillance, discipline, hierarchy, competition and the limited formation of solidarities. The school in fact became in microcosm a model of the class structure of the new industrial and social system. The role of space in this social production is shown to be crucial

Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement: A Documentary History (review)

Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement: A Documentary History (review)

Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement. Carl F. Kaestle

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsJoseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement. Carl F. Kaestle Harold D. LehmanHarold D. Lehman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 19, Number 2Jun., 1975 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/445831 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1975 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Music Instruction in Early Nineteenth-Century American Monitorial Schools

The monitorial school, developed in England in the late eighteenth century by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, was adopted in the early nineteenth-century in American schools. Educators hoped that this system, which was designed to extend the teacher's efforts by means of student assistant teachers, would provide training for children at minimal expense—up to three hundred pupils per teacher. The first three volumes of the American Journal of Education (1826–1828) were devoted almost entirely to discussions of the monitorial system and to schools that used it. Ezra Barrett's Sabbath School Psalmody was planned and published in 1828 to assist teachers in presenting music rudiments by means of this system. The most significant characteristic of the system was that the assistant teachers, or monitors, learned given lessons and then instructed other members of the class by means of prepared questions and answers. The monitors and their groups repeatedly recited the questions and answers until the information was assimilated. Henry Kemble Oliver, a teacher, church musician, and hymn-tune composer who taught in monitorial schools during the 1820s, related his observations of the monitorial system before the first annual meeting of the American Institute of Instruction in 1830. He first spoke well of the system, principally because a large number of pupils could be accommodated by a single teacher, saving time and money. However, Oliver also pointed out the superficiality of the instruction and other adverse effects that outweighed the advantages. The influence of monitorial schools declined in America during the first half of the nineteenth century with the development of public schools.

American Interest in Foreign Education a Century Ago

Cubberley writes, ' ' was not until the twenties that our educational literature began, and not until the decade between 1835-1845 that we really began to learn, for the first time, what was being done on the continent of Europe in the matter of organizing instruction.1 Some twenty pages later this statement is contradicted with the assertion that schools similar to that of Fellenberg were established in New England as early as 1819.2 An examination of the contemporary writings on education establishes even further the fact that we were well aware of what Europe was doing about the organization of instruction years before 1835. Griseom had published his Year in Europe in 1820, and in the North American Review for January, 1824, there appeared a briefer report by the same author and dealing in part with educational matters. At that time there were many American students in European Universities. It is a subject of congratulation among us that so many of our scholars have of late years attended the schools of Germany.3 At the Uni versity of G?ttington there were thirty-one American students in the period 1820-35.4 is difficult to believe that these students were silent about European education. The American Journal of Education, in its first year (1826), carried articles on the following subjects: 1. The French Academy of Instruction.p. 54 2. The College of Seio (Greece).p. 80 3. Monitorial Schools in Europe.p. 121 4. The City of London Infant Schools.p. 122 5. Education in Buenos Ayres.p. 122 6. The University of London.p. 184 7. Education in the Highlands of Scotland.p. 184 8. Primary Schools in Holland.p. 184 9. The University of Edinburg.p. 247 10. Mechanical Instruction in England.p. 251