Joseph Lancaster

Background

Joseph Lancaster was born in London on November 25, 1778. He was the son of a shopkeeper.

Career

He rejected his parents' plans for a ministerial career but brought a religious zeal to his education of the poor, the calling he chose shortly after becoming a Quaker.

In 1801 Lancaster founded an elementary school for the poor in London; it soon had a thousand boys. Unable to pay assistants, he devised the monitorial system—that is, he employed older students to teach the younger with rigid discipline, mechanical methods of drill and recitation, and an elaborate scheme of rewards and punishments. His Improvements in Education (1803) described this system in detail, including his efforts to encourage and train his best students to become schoolmasters. Because of these efforts he is recognized as a pioneer of teacher education in England, where traditionally teaching had been left to clergymen and impecunious young men.

The success of Lancaster's school and its unsectarian methods attracted the attention of the English nobility and the royal court but incurred the hostility of the Anglican Church, which wished to have the education of the poor under its religious guidance. However, his methods were adopted in 1812 by the Church-led National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor.

Lancaster allowed his school to flounder financially in 1808. A group of Quaker supporters paid his debts, rescued the school, and established the Royal Lancasterian Society in 1811 as a trust for its funds. Lancaster was grateful originally but soon began to chafe at the generosity and efficiency of his new trustees. Finally he sailed for America in 1818 to view the progress of his methods in schools in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. He established a school in Baltimore and in 1821 published a small book entitled The Lancasterian System of Education, largely a reprint of his first pamphlet with the addition of a petulant account of his chronic illness, poverty, and misfortune.

Lancaster sought recovery from an illness in the warmth of Caracas, Venezuela, where President Simón Bolìvar had invited him during an earlier visit to observe a Lancasterian model school. When poverty dogged his steps even in South America, Lancaster returned to New York, where he died on October 24, 1838, as a result of an accident.

Achievements

• Joseph Lancaster was the founder of the monitorial system of education and a pioneer of teacher education.
  
  Now there is only one Lancasterian schoolroom, built to the exacting specifications of Lancaster himself, remaining in the world. It is at the British Schools Museum, in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Epitome of some of the chief events and transactions in the life of Joseph Lancaster: Containing an account of the rise and progress of the ... future prospects of usefulness to mankind

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Improvements in Education

    (This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)

  • The British System of Education

Views

Quotations: “All are agreed, that the increase of learning and good morals are great blessings to society. ”

“It is difficult to speak or write with becoming moderation or propriety, on topics to which we are biased by prejudice, interest, or even principle. ”

“A good website has solid design, a great website is unique and meets the needs of the customer and the business it represents. ”

“I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest. ”

“The sincere teachers of their youth should be met, not with an intention to dictate to them, but to give additional force to their well-meant endeavours, and raise them to public esteem. ”

“Many thousands of youth have been deprived of the benefit of education thereby, their morals ruined, and talents irretrievably lost to society, for want of cultivation: while two parties have been idly contending who should bestow it. ”

“Indeed, I am sometimes inclined to doubt whether some men consider youth as rational and intelligent beings, with minds capable of expansion, and talents formed for usefulness. ”

“At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum. ”

Membership

A group of Quaker supporter established the Royal Lancasterian Society in 1811 and he was a member.

Personality

He was thriftless, impulsive, and undisciplined.

Connections

Lancaster got married in Caracas.

Joseph Lancaster's descendents still live in Mexico.

References

• The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century: Volume 38
• Improvements in Education, as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community: With a Brief Sketch of the Life of Joseph Lancaster (Cambridge Library Collection - Education)