monitorial system

monitorial system, teaching method, practiced most extensively in the 19th century, in which the older or better scholars taught the younger or weaker pupils. In the system as promoted by the English educator Joseph Lancaster, the superior students learned their lessons from the adult teacher in charge of the school and then transmitted their knowledge to the inferior students.

The basic principles of the monitorial system can be found in educational efforts undertaken separately by Robert Raikes (in England) and Andrew Bell (in India) in the late 18th century. The system found its strongest advocate, however, in Joseph Lancaster, a London schoolmaster whose 1803 pamphlet Improvements in Education proved broadly influential. By 1806 Lancaster’s monitorial system for the education of poor children was the most widely emulated in the world. The method marked its success through economy (it reduced the number of adult teachers needed) and efficiency (it avoided wasting the time of children who waited for the attention of the principal teacher).

Parents of the monitors, however, objected to the learning time their children were losing even though many of the monitors were paid a small weekly sum. It was found that some training of the monitors was necessary, and in about 1840 the movement began that replaced monitors with “pupil-teachers”—i.e., boys and girls who, at the age of 13, were apprenticed for a period of five years, during which time they learned the art of teaching while continuing their education under the head teacher of an elementary school. Some such programs developed into normal schools and training colleges, in which professional and academic education could be continued after the apprenticeship was completed. The rapid rise and decline of the monitorial system in the United States was an important factor in the establishment of free nondenominational school systems.