How
Hindu Schooling Came To America (III)
Young Bell was a go-getter. Two years
after he got to India he was superintendent of the male orphan asylum of Madras. In order to save money Bell
decided to try the Hindu system he
had seen and found it led students quickly to docile cooperation, like parts of
a machine. Furthermore, they
seemed relieved not to have to think, grateful to have their time reduced to rituals and
routines as
Frederick Taylor was to reform the American workplace a hundred years later.
In 1797, Bell, now
forty-two, published an account of what he had seen and done. Pulling no punches, he praised Hindu drill as
an effective impediment to learning writing and ciphering, an efficient control on reading development. A
twenty-year-old Quaker,
Joseph Lancaster, read Bell's pamphlet, thought deeply on the method,
and concluded, ironically, it
would be a cheap way to awaken intellect in the lower classes, ignoring
the Anglican's observation (and
Hindu experience) that it did just the opposite.
Lancaster began to gather poor children
under his father's roof in Borough Road,
London, to give them rudimentary instruction without a fee. Word spread
and children emerged from every
alley, dive, and garret, craving to learn. Soon a thousand children were gathering in the street. The Duke
of Bedford heard about Lancaster and provided him with a single enormous schoolroom and a few materials.
The monitorial system, as it was
called, promised to promote a mental counterpart to the productivity of
factories.
Transforming dirty ghetto children into
an orderly army attracted many observers. The fact that Lancaster's school ran at tiny cost with only one
employee raised interest, too.
Invitations arrived to lecture in surrounding towns, where the Quaker
expounded on what had now become
his system. Lancaster schools multiplied under the direction of young men he personally trained. So talked
about did the phenomenon become, it eventually attracted the attention of King George III himself, who
commanded an interview with
Joseph. Royal patronage followed on the stipulation that every poor
child be taught to read the
Bible.
But with fame and public responsibility,
another side of Lancaster showed itself — he became vain, reckless, improvident. Interested noblemen
bailed him out after he fell
deeply in debt, and helped him found the British and Foreign School
Society, but Lancaster hated being
watched over and soon proved impossible to control. He left the organization his patrons erected,
starting a private school which went bankrupt. By 1818 the Anglican Church, warming to Bell's
insight that schooled ignorance was more useful than unschooled stupidity, set up a rival chain of factory
schools that proved to be
handwriting on the wall for Lancaster. In the face of this competition
he fled to America where his fame
and his method had already preceded him.
Meanwhile, in
England, the whole body of dissenting sects gave Lancaster vociferous public support, thoroughly alarming the
state church hierarchy. Prominent church laymen and clergy were not unaware that Lancaster's schools weren't
playing by Hindu rules — the
prospect of a literate underclass with unseemly ambitions was a window on a
future impossible to tolerate. Bell
had been recalled from his rectory in Dorset in 1807 to contest Lancaster's use of Hindu
schooling. In 181 1, he was named superintendent of an organization to oppose Lancaster's
British and Foreign School Society, "The National Society for Promoting the Education of
the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church." Since those principles held that the poor were
poor because the Lord wanted it
that way, the content of the society's schooling leaves little about
which we need to speculate. Bell
was sent to plant his system in Presbyterian Scotland, while the patronage advantage of Bell-system schools
contained and diminished the reach of Lancaster. For his services to the state, Bell was eventually buried in
Westminster Abbey.
At first, Lancaster was welcomed warmly
in the United States, but his affection for children and his ability to awaken pride and ambition in his
charges made him ultimately unacceptable to important patrons who were
much more interested in spreading Bell's
dumbed-down method, without its Church of England baggage attached.
Fortunately for their schemes,
Lancaster grew even more shiftless, unmethodical, and incapable of sustained effort (or principled
action). In the twenty remaining years of his life, Lancaster ranged from Montreal to Caracas,
disowned by Quakers for reasons I've been unable to discover. He once declared it would be possible to teach
illiterates to read fluently in
twenty to ninety days, which is certainly true. At the age of sixty he was
run over by a carriage in New York
and died a few hours later.
But while he died an outcast, his system
outlived him, or at least a system bearing his name did, albeit more Bell's than Lancaster's. It accustomed
an influential public to expect
streets to be clear of the offspring of the poor and to expenditures of tax
money to accomplish this end. The
first Lancaster school was opened in New York City in 1806; by 1 829 the idea had spread to the
Mexican state of Texas with stops as far west as Cincinnati, Louisville, and Detroit. The governors of New
York and Pennsylvania recommended
general adoption to their legislatures.
What exactly was a "Lancaster"
school? Its essential features involved one large room stuffed with anywhere from 300 to 1,000
children under the direction of a single teacher. The children were seated in rows. The teacher was not there
to teach but to be "a
bystander and inspector"; students, ranked in a paramilitary
hierarchy, did the actual teaching:
What the master says
should be done. When the pupils as well as the schoolmaster understand how to act and learn on this
system, the system, not the master's vague discretionary, uncertain judgment, will be in practice. In
common school the authority of the
master is personal, and the rod is his scepter. His absence is an immediate
signal for confusion, but in a
school conducted on my plan when the master leaves the school, the business will go on as well in his
absence as in his presence, [emphases added]
Here, without forcing the matter, is our
modern pedagogus technologicus, harbinger of future computerized instruction. In such a system, teachers
and administrators are forbidden
to depart from instructions elsewhere written. But while dumbing children down was the whole of the government
school education in England, it was only part of the story in America, and a minor one until the twentieth
century.
Braddock's
Defeat
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