The andlancasterian school It is an educational method that owes its name to its creator, Joseph Lancaster, a British teacher who took the system previously invented by Andrew Bell and slightly reformed it to adapt it to his educational philosophy. The first experiments were carried out in England, but their influence soon reached America.
In 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.
The teachers took care of the smartest and easiest-to-learn children first, and these, in turn, cared for the youngest 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.
The Lancastrian school established a very orderly and regulated way for its operation. 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..
Education in eighteenth-century England was tremendously class-based, 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 primary education in adequate conditions..
To alleviate these deficiencies, a series of philosophers, pedagogues or simply teachers, began to propose alternatives. Among them were Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell.
It was Andrew Bell who first applied a similar educational system that was later popularized by Lancaster. Both started practically at the same time and ended up having some important 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 nursing home in question had many financial problems. The teachers barely paid and the quality of the teaching left much to be desired. To alleviate the problem, Bell began to use the more advanced students to take care of the little ones.
According to his biographers, the Scotsman chose an 8-year-old boy and taught him to write. Once the child learned, he went on to teach another of his classmates.
From that first success, Bell spread the idea, choosing other kids. He baptized the system as 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..
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 expanded it throughout America, to the point that the method became known as the Lancasterian school..
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 had..
The Anglican Church was concerned about the advancement 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 eventually gaining the support of the ecclesiastical authorities, the British courts preferred Lancaster and his system began to be applied in numerous colleges.
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 youngest, were supervised by 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 usual thing 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.
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