“America,” writes historian Adam Laats, “has never been willing to learn its lesson.”
In his most recent book, he writes of an education movement that is filled with familiar features. A promise to educate the poor and thereby lift them out of poverty. A scripted program that could be used to scale up the program. New technology to that would both boost education and reduce costs. Expectations of revolutionary savings because of revolutionary efficiency. And in the end, a systemic inadequacy that should have been obvious from the beginning, but was ignored by reformers who just really wanted to believe in a huckster’s confident promises.
Mr. Lancaster’s System is the story of Joseph Lancaster’s school system, how it failed, and how it set the stage for public education in the United States.
Both the promises and the failure are familiar. And it all happened 200 years ago.
Joseph Lancaster was an abusive and shameless egotist who brought his educational system to the United States in 1818 primarily because he had worn out his welcome in Great Britain (He proved to be, says Brittanica, “vain, rash, and extravagant”). In Laats’s telling, it appears that Lancaster intended that his system would bring him the wealth and renown that he felt his genius justly deserved.
Lancaster schools were, in theory, highly regimented, their teachers following a precise and detailed schedule for instruction. They also depended on the unpaid labor of the older students, who were used to teach other students. The schools required certain instructional approaches, based primarily on Lancaster’s own supreme self-confidence.
That same self-confidence was instrumental in spreading the Lancasterian movement. City leaders, afraid of growing numbers of uneducated poor children in their streets, saw in Lancaster a real solution to their problems. And Lancaster’s pitchmanship was such that he quickly had leading politicians declaring they had seen miracles worked in Lancaster schools where they had seen none. This system, reformers declared, would revolutionize education.
But as Lancaster schools spread, a problem emerged. They simply didn’t work the way Lancaster promised they would. There were a couple of successful Lancaster schools in this country, but as Laats points out, such success only came where the school had substantial resources and support.
Where the Lancaster system was failing, operators had a choice—either throw in the towel and declare that they had been duped, or start modifying the system to be more successful. Writes Laats:
When it didn’t work as promised, they fixed and patched Lancaster’s system to make it address the demands of families, and in doing so they created modern urban public school systems.
And therein lies the irony of Mr. Lancaster’s system. In practice, it failed. Lancaster himself moved on to Venezuela in 1824, looking for new markets for his system (and pestering Bolivar for money). But the system’s promise of a quality education for even the poorest children excited the American imagination. The schools that no longer resembled Lancaster’s vision became attractive enough that middle-class parents wanted in.
Lancaster’s name is largely unknown to casual students of American education, which is too bad because education reformers have repeated many of his mistakes two centuries later. Why is he not better remembered? Laats writes of his former supporters, “They publicized the promise, but they buried the flop.” That promise sparked an interest in education for all. As Laats puts it
One of the greatest flops in US history produced one of its greatest, most revolutionary successes.
It was a hard way to get there, and as Laats writes, the real tragedy of the saga is not just the time, money and energy wasted, but “that the lessons of its failures have gone unheeded for so long.”
Laats combines thorough scholarship with bright and accessible writing. Mr. Lancaster’s System is a fascinating tale that at once illuminates a little-noted chapter of history while also shedding light on our present. For anyone with even a passing interest in education policy and history, this is a must-read.