Joseph Lancaster

Educator and Quaker, born in London, UK. In 1798 he opened a school in London based on a monitorial system, in which the more able children taught the less able. This led to the founding of the Lancasterian method, popular in Europe and, later, North America. The Royal Lancasterian Society was formed in 1808, but Lancaster severed his connections in 1818. He was welcomed in the USA, where he founded more than 60 schools in New York City alone.

Joseph Lancaster (25 November 1778 – 23 October 1838) was an English Quaker, and public education innovator.

Lancaster was born the son of a shopkeeper in Southwark, south London.

In 1798, he founded a free elementary school in Borough Road, Southwark, using a variant of the monitorial system. This method is now commonly known as peer tutoring (also Learning by teaching) but the economics of Lancaster's or Bell's methodology is not widely discussed.

Lancaster wrote Improvements in Education in 1803 and later travelled to the United States to lecture and promote his ideas. The height of popularity of his system was in the first decade of the 19th century and in 1808 saw the creation of The Society for Promoting the Lancasterian System for the Education of the Poor.

However, despite initial successes, the Lancasterian schools came under a considerable amount of criticism. Although Lancaster had rejected corporal punishment, misbehaving children might find themselves tied up in sacks, or hoisted above the classroom in cages. The poet Robert Southey was to note that, despite his opposition to corporal punishment, he would rather be beaten, than subjected to Lancasterian discipline.

Moreover, Lancaster fell out with The Society over a number of issues. Whilst poor financial management was ostensibly the reason for the clash, his colleagues had also discovered that Lancaster had been privately beating a number of the boys which whom he worked. Although this body was to be widely successful in the early part of the nineteenth century, the waning popularity of monitorial methods during the 1820s and 1830s meant that the body soon becaem a conventional school society.

His ideas are being revisited by schools now as an effective model for reducing costs.

A number of schools using his system were established in Lower Canada before he settled there in 1828. Reflecting his travels and work in South America there is at least one school in Venezuela that retains Lancaster's name.

There is only one Lancasterian Schoolroom, built to the exacting specifications of Lancaster himself, remaining in the world.

Lancaster died in New York from injuries sustained after being run over by a horse carriage.