So far we’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. Today, we’re going to jump ahead again to the first decades of the 19th century and look at the the Founding Fathers’ desire for an educated populace and the borrowed system that tried accomplish that.
Ashford Academy, Connecticut, built in 1825. Image in the public domain.
After the Revolutionary War, the fledgling U.S. government believed that the success of the fragile American democracy was dependent on the competency of its citizens. They believed strongly that preserving democracy would be impossible without an educated population that could understand political and social issues, participate in civic life, vote wisely, protect their rights and freedoms, and resist tyrants. The nation’s founders recognized that educating people for citizenship required a more systematic approach to schooling. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other early leaders proposed the creation of a more formal and unified system of publicly funded schools. In 1785 and 1787, the federal government offered substantial land grants to new states entering the union as long as the states agreed to set aside a portion of these lands for the support of public schools. This alone demonstrates how seriously the founding fathers took education and how important they believed it was to the protection of democracy.
Lancaster Monitorial System; note how small groups of boys are clustered around the room learning their lessons with a monitor. Note too, the teacher disciplining students. Image in the public domain.
In the first few decades of the 19th century, education was still — and this is really understating things — fragmented and highly variable. Some Northeastern communities already had publicly funded schools by 1800, but many schools were still pay-to-play. In the more thinly populated and rural South, schooling for wealthy families was largely done by private tutors; for poorer families it often didn’t occur at all. In places that did have schools, teachers were thin on the ground so many schools turned to a model borrowed from England: the Lancaster Monitorial System. In this system, a teacher might have hundreds of students in a “class.” Students were not grouped by grades but rather by the content they had mastered. They moved up when they mastered the material (usually by reciting it). Older, more accomplished students were drafted by the teacher as “monitors,” responsible for teaching younger students, which meant drilling them in their recitations. They were also responsible for helping absent students make up work they had missed and for deciding which students were ready for promotion. Some monitors even supervised other monitors. For this work they got some small perks and privileges. The teacher’s responsibility was to instruct the monitors in the lessons at the start of the day and then “the teacher had only to organize, oversee, reward, punish, and inspire.”
Joseph Lancaster; image in the public domain
Joseph Lancaster, who created the system, is an interesting character. A cursory look at his system might lead you to think he was driven by economic motives, but the reverse was true. Instead, he was driven by the idea of providing access to education for all students,* regardless of class or income. He was a devout Quaker, a denomination that experienced frequent discrimination by the Church of England. Quaker philosophy required serving the poor as Jesus did; in this way they lived out the principles of their faith. Lancaster had himself grown up poor and was educated because he had been a student instructor under a similar system created by a Scottish clergyman in India. In 1798, Lancaster’s religious beliefs converged with his love of teaching and he opened his own school in his family home. He charged poor families four pennies a week for expenses, but he often waived the fee if they couldn’t pay. His first class consisted of two students; within the year, enrollment had jumped to 130. There was a great desire for education among the working poor because education literally opened doors to a better life. Lancaster’s monitoring system was born out of a desire to make education available and attainable to as many students as possible. Obviously, in a system where a single teacher might have 150 or more students (sometimes many more), one or two or even ten families’ inability to pay would still leave enough paying students for the teacher to earn a living wage.
If this idea seems a bit pie-in-the-sky, it is. I suspect that under Lancaster himself it may have worked well, informed as it was by his deep religious beliefs and desire to serve the poor. But transmitted to other places under other instructors, the system showed some distinct cracks. Other entities were driven by economic motives. Given the shortage of teachers in the infant United States of the early 1800s, the system became very attractive for towns and cities that needed to educate their children but were short of funds. As the sheer number of students desiring education grew, the system came to represent a huge savings in teacher salaries. Some teachers had 300, 400, even 500 students, and that in no way seemed untenable to the community.
Student monitors were responsible for almost every aspect of classroom management and they often had heavy workloads that weren’t really offset by their few extra privileges. Under Lancaster himself, monitors eventually were paid small sums for their work, but in other places it appears they remained unpaid even though they were doing the vast majority of the teaching. Parents began objecting to their children being monitors because they believed they spent all their time teaching others and none on their own learning, and it seems very likely that this was what was happening. This dissatisfaction caused the popularity of monitorial schools to fade by the 1830s. The U.S. needed a new system, a better way to educate children. And a lawyer, tutor, and librarian from Massachusetts was about to take center stage.
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*Let’s be clear here that by ‘students’ we mean boys. Girls were still educated at home or in dame schools, and only to the point of basic literacy.