22.How Hindu Schooling Came To America (III): The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

22.How Hindu Schooling Came To America (III): The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

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