Lancaster Joseph

Lancaster died on 23 October 1838 in New York City from injuries sustained in a street accident. At the time of his death, between 1,200 and 1,500 schools were said to use his principles.

Lancaster left Caracas covertly in April 1827, sailing first to Saint Thomas and Saint Croix, and arriving in New Haven in June. He left his wife Mary and her children to make their own way back to Philadelphia. There was at least one school in Venezuela that retained Lancaster's name in the longer term.

Affairs at Caracas went badly for Lancaster, however, with his lack of Spanish impeding the educational work. He clashed with Robert Ker Porter, the British consul from the end of 1825, who regarded him as an imposter. Lancaster involved himself with the Topo Valley settlers, Scots brought to the locality in 1825 by John Diston Powles and associates. Bolívar and Lancaster fell out over non-payment of the promised sum to support the educational work.

Lancaster and family arrived at La Guayra in May 1824. His daughter Betsy and her husband moved on to Mexico in February 1825, and did not return. Lancaster stayed from 1825 to 1827 in Caracas and married there for the second time, with Bolívar presiding over the wedding.

On 20 April 1824, Betsy married Richard Madox Jones in Philadelphia: he had crossed the Atlantic with the Lancasters, and formed part of the household. This wedding took place shortly before the family moved to Caracas. Jones was trained in the System at Borough Road in 1812, and had then taught at Godalming, followed by a period in Cornwall. He became a Lancasterian organiser in Mexico, dying in 1855. Joseph Lancaster's descendants still live in Mexico: see Ricardo Lancaster-Jones y Verea.

Lancaster helped to start the first model school in Philadelphia to train teachers to implement his system. He also started a school in Baltimore, but it was not financially viable. A Lancasterian school was set up in New Haven in 1822, with the help of Timothy Dwight IV, and was run successfully by John Lowell, an American disciple.

The BFSS was widely successful in the early part of the 19th century, but the waning popularity of monitorial methods during the 1820s and 1830s meant that it became a more conventional school society. There is just one remaining Lancasterian schoolroom, built to the specifications of Lancaster himself. It is at the British Schools Museum, in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England.

In 1818, backed by the mill owner David Holt and other friends, Lancaster and his family sailed to the United States. He had significant American supporters: Roberts Vaux and Robert Ralston in Philadelphia, and DeWitt Clinton in New York. Clinton had founded a Lancasterian school in 1806, prompted by Thomas Eddy, who knew of Lancaster's work via Patrick Colquhoun in London. Eddy had recently recruited a BFSS master, Charles Pickton trained by Lancaster, for the New York school, leaving no place for Lancaster himself.

Lancaster's supporters have been defined as "influential Nonconformists, utilitarian liberals and radicals." They included Edward Wakefield and James Mill. In his education book Chrestomathia (1816), Jeremy Bentham supported a version of the monitorial system, for which he gave both Bell and Lancaster credit, but moved from Lancaster's non-sectarian religious stance to a secularism hostile to Anglicanism.

The Rev. Thaddeus Osgood had set up schools using Lancaster's system in Lower Canada, one in Quebec in 1814, another in Kingston, Ontario. Lancaster was there in 1829, and opened a school in Montreal, but his attempts to obtain funding floundered and he moved back to the United States.

After initial successes, the Lancasterian schools were criticized for poor standards and harsh discipline. Lancaster had rejected Corporal Punishment, but misbehaving children might find themselves tied up in sacks, or hoisted above the classroom in cages. Robert Southey was an opponent of Corporal Punishment, also: but he wrote in 1812, after giving examples of shaming punishments listed in Lancaster's writings:

Lancaster fell out with the Society over a number of issues. There was poor financial management, and he was imprisoned in a sponging house for debt. According to Francis Place, a committee member from 1812, they had information that Lancaster had been privately beating a number of the boys. Critics accused him of deism and homosexuality. He was ousted from the Society in 1814.

After Lancaster's initial royal recognition, the monarchy turned away in the 1810s, and the Church of England sustained its hostility.

Simón Bolívar had visited the Borough Road School in 1810. Two young men were then sent from South America to study the system. In 1823, Lancaster encountered in Baltimore Brooke Young, a soldier with Bolívar's Irish Legion, and Young took a letter for him to Bolívar in Gran Colombia.

The year 1808 saw the creation of "The Society for Promoting the Lancasterian System for the Education of the Poor". A major figure in it was William Allen, another Quaker, who acted as treasurer. It went by the name Royal Lancasterian Society. According to Henry Dunn, writing in 1848, the others on the initial committee were William Corston, Joseph Foster (of Bromley), Joseph Fox, John Jackson and Thomas Sturge. This group, without Sturge, raised £5600 for Lancaster's school.

The Borough Road school called itself the Royal Free School, and Lancaster was granted an audience with George III in 1805, at Weymouth. This apogee of recognition built on the support of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, and involved two royal dukes, Kent and Strathearn and Sussex.

The context in England for the Lancasterian school was the array of elementary dame schools (typically fee-paying), charity schools, Sunday schools (such as those set up by Robert Raikes around Gloucester) and the Mendip Hills schools run by the evangelical Hannah More. Sarah Trimmer, involved in the London area in both Sunday school and charity school work, and concerned for the evangelical Anglican parent, attacked Lancaster's use of pupil monitors in A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education Promulgated by Mr. Joseph Lancaster (1805). "A Churchman", writing to the British Critic in October 1805, commented that

Lancaster wrote Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community in 1803. It brought him positive publicity, and the Borough Road school numerous visitors.

In 1798, Lancaster founded a free elementary school, with support from his father. He went on in 1801 to start in Borough Road, Southwark a free school using a variant of the monitorial system.

Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) was an English Quaker and public education innovator. He originated the saying "a place for everything and everything in its place". The height of popularity of his system came in the first decades of the 19th century.

He was born in Southwark, south London, on 25 November 1778, into a large family, the son of Richard Lancaster who had been a soldier and made cane sieves, and his wife Sarah Faulkes who was a shopkeeper. He was interested as a teenager in missionary work in Jamaica. He is said to have run away from home, and to have been returned through naval connections of the minister Thomas Urwick.