Lancaster System of Education

= a system of Mutual Instruction, also called Lancasterian system, Bell-Lancaster Method, or Monitorial System, an educational system popular in the 19th cy. based on students teaching each other

URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-Lancaster_method

Description

"The Monitorial System (also known as "mutual instruction" or the "Bell-Lancaster method" 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 method was based on the abler pupils being used as 'helpers' to the teacher, passing on the information they had learned to other students. The Monitorial System 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 methodology was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, and later by the National Schools System.

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

The Monitorial System, although widely spread and with many advocates, fell into disfavour with David Stow's "Glasgow System" which advocated trained teachers with higher goals than those of monitors.

Gladman, writing in the 1880s, distinguishes between the Lancasterian system and the Madras System. The Lancasterian System is described as preferring smaller classes, unlike Bell's Madras System. Lancaster specified an ideal classroom (hall) as being a "parallelogram, the length about twice the width. The windows were to be six feet from the floor. The floor should be inclined, rising one foot in twenty from the master's desk to the upper end of the room, where the highest class is situated. The master's desk is on the middle of a platform two to three feet high, erected at the lower end of the room. Forms and desks, fixed firmly to the ground, occupy the middle of the room, a passage being left between the ends of the forms and the wall, five or six feet broad, where the children form semicircles for reading." (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bell-Lancaster-method/144734948870292; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-Lancaster_method)