LANCASTERIAN SCHOOL: ORIGIN, METHOD AND CHARACTERISTICS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The e Lancastrian chool is an educational method that is named after its creator, Joseph Lancaster, a British teacher who collected the system previously invented by Andrew Bell and amended slightly to suit your educational philosophy. The first experiments were carried out in England, but their influence soon reached America.

On the American continent it was quite successful in many countries, from Canada to Argentina, with a special incidence in Mexico. With this way of educating, only a small number of teachers were needed to serve hundreds of children.

Joseph Lancaster

Teachers took care of the smartest and easiest-to-learn kids first, and these, in turn, looked after the younger or less advanced children. In this way, a kind of pyramid of knowledge was established, with each row helping the lower one to learn, without the need for a teacher to control it.

The Lancasterian school established a very orderly and regulated way of functioning. There was a system of rewards and punishments that, although they were prohibited in the physical sphere, were found very severe by many citizens and experts.

Origin

Education in eighteenth-century England was tremendously class-oriented, with a great difference between those who could afford to go to private schools or hire private tutors and the less favored.

Increasing industrialization, which emphasized these class differences, only deepened the problem. The traditional upper class and the new middle class had access to quality education, but the children of the popular classes could not even receive a proper primary education.

To alleviate these deficiencies, a series of philosophers, pedagogues or simply teachers, began to propose alternatives. Among them were Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell.

Andrew Bell

It was Andrew Bell who first applied a similar educational system that was later popularized by Lancaster. Both started at about the same time and ended up having some major discrepancies.

Bell was born in Scotland in 1753 and had a degree in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. He had been ordained a minister in the Church of England and was posted to India as an army chaplain. There he occupied the direction of an asylum for orphans of soldiers, located near Madras; that work was what inspired him to create his method.

The asylum in question had many financial problems. Teachers hardly paid and the quality of teaching left much to be desired. To alleviate the problem, Bell began to use the more advanced students to take care of the younger ones.

According to his biographers, the Scotsman chose an 8-year-old boy and taught him to write. Once the boy learned, he went on to teach another of his classmates.

From that first success, Bell spread the idea, choosing other kids. He christened the system mutual instruction.

Once he returned to England, he published an article recounting his experience and, after a few years, his method began to be used in some schools in the country.

Joseph Lancaster

Lancaster, who taught at Borough School in London, was the one who really popularized the system. Thanks to his method, a single teacher could take care of up to 1000 students.

The British named his method as a monitoring system, since the more advanced students who took care of the rest were called monitors.

What is not clear is if Lancaster knew of Bell's work and simply modified it or if, on the contrary, he believed it from the beginning. What is known is that the experience in India happened first and that they both knew each other.

In any case, it was Lancaster who spread it throughout America, to the point that the method became known as the Lancasterian school.

Differences between the two

The differences between the two methods (and between the two men) were mainly due to the extent to which religion should have in school. Lancaster, who was a Quaker, had a much more tolerant aptitude for other beliefs than Bell did.

The Anglican Church was concerned about the advance of the monitorial system, since it had been adopted by the so-called non-conformist teachers. This concern was taken advantage of by Bell, who advised the Church to adopt its own method.

As discussed above, the Scotsman was a minister of the Church and, as such, he attached great importance to religious teaching. However, despite the fact that he finally obtained the support of the ecclesiastical authorities, the British courts preferred Lancaster and his system began to be applied in many colleges.

Lancasterian method and its characteristics

Teaching methodology

In the methodology created by Lancaster, the first thing that changes is the traditional relationship between teacher and student. With this system, the student himself can go on to teach other children, although he does not stop studying.

Experts point out that the philosophy behind this system was utilitarian. As they point out, that was what made it so successful in Latin America.

The monitors, outstanding students who acted teaching the little ones, received the supervision of the teachers. This meant that each of the teachers could handle up to 1000 students. Obviously, this offered great accessibility at a very low cost, which made it perfect for less favored populations.

The method had a series of very rigid rules, with a regulation that marked each step that had to be taken to teach reading, counting and writing. The most common was to use posters or printed figures that remembered these steps. When you learned the first figure, you could move on to the second.

Although it may seem that it was a very liberalized education, the truth is that there were individual controls of knowledge. These were carried out by the monitors, who evaluated each of the steps learned.

characteristics

- As said before, only one teacher was necessary for a ratio of up to 1000 students, since the monitors were in charge of sharing what they learned with the rest.

- The Lancasterian school did not succeed beyond primary education. Thus, only a few subjects were taught, including reading, arithmetic, writing, and Christian doctrine. Figures and posters with the steps to be learned in each of these subjects were hung on the walls.

- The division within the school was into groups of 10 children who were accompanied by their corresponding monitor, following an established schedule. In addition, there was a general monitor, who was in charge of controlling attendance, maintaining discipline or distributing the material.

- Lancaster did not support physical punishment, very much in vogue in his native England. However, the punishments he established for their schools were also quite harsh, as they could be reprimanded by holding heavy stones, being tied up or even being put in cages.

References

1. Villalpando Nava, José Ramón. History of Education in Mexico. Recovered from detemasytemas.files.wordpress.com
2. Education History. LANCASTER method. Obtained from historiadelaeducacion.blogspot.com.es
3. Wikipedia. Joseph Lancaster. Obtained from es.wikipedia.org
4. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Monitorial system. Retrieved from britannica.com
5. Matzat, Amy. The Lancasterian System of Teaching. Retrieved from nd.edu
6. Baker, Edward. A brief sketch of the Lancasterian system. Recovered from books.google.es
7. Gale Research Inc. The Lancastrian Method. Retrieved from encyclopedia.com