22. How
Hindu Schooling Came To America (III) The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment