The schools, mechanical as they now seem, marked a great improvement over the individual method upon which schoolmasters for centuries had wasted so much of their own and their pupils' time. In place of earlier idleness, inattention, and disorder, Bell and Lancaster introduced activity, emulation, order, and a kind of military discipline which was of much value to the type of children attending these schools. Lancaster's biographer, Salmon, has written of the system that so thoroughly was the instruction worked out that the teacher had only to organize, oversee, reward, punish, and inspire:
When a child was admitted a monitor assigned him his class; while he remained, a monitor taught him (with nine other pupils); when he was absent, one monitor ascertained the fact, and another found out the reason; a monitor examined him periodically, and, when he made progress, a monitor promoted him; a monitor ruled the writing paper; a monitor had charge of slates and books; and a monitor-general looked after all the other monitors. Every monitor wore a leather ticket, gilded and lettered, "Monitor of the First Class," "Reading Monitor of the Second Class," etc.
VALUE OF THE SYSTEM IN AWAKENING INTEREST. The monitorial system of instruction, coming at the time it did, exerted a very important influence in awakening interest in and a sentiment for schools. It increased the number of people who possessed the elements of an education; made schools much more talked about; and aroused thought and provoked discussion on the question of education. It did much toward making people see the advantages of a certain amount of schooling, and be willing to contribute to its support. Under the plans previously in use education had been a slow and an expensive process, because it had to be carried on by the individual method of instruction, and in quite small groups. Under this new plan it was now possible for one teacher to instruct 300, 400, 500, or more pupils in a single room, and to do it with much better results in both learning and discipline than the old type of schoolmaster had achieved.
All at once, comparatively, a new system had been introduced which not only improved and popularized, but tremendously cheapened education. [22] Lancaster, in his Improvements in Education, gave the annual cost of schooling under his system as only seven shillings sixpence ($1.80) per pupil, and this was later decreased to four shillings fivepence ($1.06) as the school was increased to accommodate a thousand pupils. Under the Bell system the yearly cost per pupil, in a school of five hundred, was only four shillings twopence ($1.00), in 1814. In the United States, Lancastrian schools cost from $1.22 per pupil in New York, in 1822, up to $3.00 and $4.00 later on. At first begun as free schools, [23] the expansion of effort was more rapid than the income from contributions, and a small tuition fee was in time charged. Pupils were admitted at about the age of seven, and might remain until thirteen or fourteen, though an attendance of two years was considered "abundantly sufficient for any boy." To prepare skilled masters and mistresses for the schools, girls were provided for in many places—training or model schools were organized by both the national societies, and these represent the beginnings of normal-school training in England.
INFANT SCHOOLS. Another type of school which became of much importance in England, and spread to other lands, was the Infant School. This owed its origin to Robert Owen, proprietor of the cotton mills at New Lanark, Scotland. Being of a philanthropic turn of mind, and believing that man was entirely the product of circumstance and environment, he held that it was not possible to begin too early in implanting right habits and forming character. Poverty and crime, he believed, were results of errors in the various systems of education and government. So plastic was child nature, that society would be able to mould itself "into the very image of rational wishes and desires." That "the infants of any one class in the world may be readily formed into men of any other class," was a fundamental belief of his.
[Illustration: FIG. 189 ROBERT OWEN (1771-1858)]
When he took charge of the mills at New Lanark (1799) he found the usual wretched social conditions of the time. Children of five, six, and seven years were bound out to the factory as apprentices (R. 242) for a period of nine years. They worked as apprentices and helpers in the factories twelve to thirteen hours a day, and at early manhood were turned free to join the ignorant mass of the population. Owen sought to remedy this condition. He accordingly opened schools which children might enter at three years of age, receiving them into the schools almost as soon as they were able to walk, and caring for them while their parents were at work. Children under ten he forbade to work in the mills, and for these he provided schools. The instruction for the children younger than six was to be "whatever might be supposed useful that they could understand," and much was made of singing, dancing, and play. Moral instruction was made a prominent feature. By 1814 his work and his schools had become famous. In 1817 he published a plan for the organization of such industrial communities as he conducted. In 1818 he visited Switzerland, and saw Pestalozzi and Fellenberg.
In 1818 a number of Liberals—Brougham, James Mill, and others—combined to establish an Infant School in London, importing a teacher from New Lanark. The idea took root, was popularized, and the Infant School was soon adopted as an integral part of their schools by both the British and Foreign School Society (Lancastrians) and the National Society (Bell). In 1836 the "Home and Colonial Infant School Society" was formed to train teachers for and to establish Infant Schools. One of the organizers of this society was Charles Mayo who had worked with Pestalozzi at Yverdon (R. 270), and through his influence much of the bookishness which had crept in was removed and the better Pestalozzian procedure put in its place.
Unlike the monitorial schools, the Infant Schools were based on the idea of small-group work, and were usually conducted in harmony with the new psychological conceptions of instruction which had been worked out by Pestalozzi, and had by that time begun to be introduced into England. The Infant-School idea came at an opportune time, as the defects of the mechanical Lancastrian instruction were becoming evident and its popularity was waning. It gave a new and a somewhat deeper philosophical interpretation of the educational process, created a stronger demand than had before been known for trained teachers, established a preference for women teachers for primary work, and tended to give a new dignity to teaching and school work by revealing something of a psychological basis for the instruction of little children. It also contributed its share toward awakening a sentiment for national action.
WORK OF THE EDUCATIONAL SOCIETIES. The work of the voluntary and philanthropic educational societies in establishing schools and providing teachers and instruction before the days of national schools was enormous. [24] Though the State did nothing before 1833, and little before 1870, the work of the educational societies was large and important. What was done by the church societies alone may be seen from the following table: