monitorial system

A concept of early 19th-c British education, developed by British educationists Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838), to train young school leavers to act as teachers' assistants or ‘monitors’. It involved only a few hours' training.

The Bell-Lancaster method (also known as "mutual instruction" or the "monitorial system"), named after the British educators Dr Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster who both independently developed it, was an education method that became popular at a global scale during the early 19th century.

The Bell-Lancaster method was found very useful by 19th-century educators, as it proved to be a cheap way of making primary education more inclusive, thus making it possible to increase the average class size.

The system is not entirely unlike the way professors, assistants and tutors work together in university education.