gat

without its Church of England baggage attached. Fortunately for their schemes, Lancaster grew
even more shiftless, unmethodical, and incapable of sustained effort (or principled action). In the
twenty remaining years of his life, Lancaster ranged from Montreal to Caracas, disowned by
Quakers for reasons I’ve been unable to discover. He once declared it would be possible to teach
illiterates to read fluently in twenty to ninety days, which is certainly true. At the age of sixty he
was run over by a carriage in New York and died a few hours later.
But while he died an outcast, his system outlived him, or at least a system bearing his name did,
albeit more Bell’s than Lancaster’s. It accustomed an influential public to expect streets to be
clear of the offspring of the poor and to expenditures of tax money to accomplish this end. The
first Lancaster school was opened in New York City in 1806; by 1829 the idea had spread to the
Mexican state of Texas with stops as far west as Cincinnati, Louisville, and Detroit. The
governors of New York and Pennsylvania recommended general adoption to their legislatures.
What exactly was a "Lancaster" school? Its essential features involved one large room stuffed
with anywhere from three hundred to a thousand children under the direction of a single teacher.
The children were seated in rows. The teacher was not there to teach but to be "a bystander and
inspector"; students, ranked in a paramilitary hierarchy, did the actual teaching:
What the master says should be done. When the pupils as well as the
schoolmaster understand how to act and learn on this system, the system, not
the master’s vague discretionary, uncertain judgment, will be in practice. In
common school the authority of the master is personal, and the rod is his
scepter. His absence is an immediate signal for confusion, but in a school
conducted on my plan when the master leaves the school, the business will go
on as well in his absence as in his presence. [emphasis added]
Here, without forcing the matter, is our modern pedagogus technologicus, harbinger of future
computerized instruction. In such a system, teachers and administrators are forbidden to depart
from instructions elsewhere written. But while dumbing children down was the whole of the
government school education in England, it was only part of the story in America, and a minor
one until the twentieth century.
Braddock’s Defeat
Unless you’re a professional sports addict and know that Joe Montana, greatest quarterback of
the modern era, went to Waverly school in Monongahela, or that Ron Neccai, only man in
modern baseball history to strike out every batter on the opposing team for a whole game did,
too, or that Ken Griffey Jr. went to its high school as well, you can be forgiven if you never heard
of Monongahela. But once upon a time at the beginning of our national history, Monongahela
marked the forward edge of a new nation, a wilder West than ever the more familiar West
became. Teachers on a frontier cannot be bystanders.
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