
The Monitorial System of education used to teach the masses in the nineteenth century. From, A Cyclopedia of Education: Volume 4, edited by Paul Monroe (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918).
The phrase ‘teacher quality’ is “judgmental, simplistic.. and undermining of real teacher professionalism”, argued Melbourne high school English teacher, Peter Job, recently. The current debate about ‘teacher quality’ portrayed teachers as “static commodities like cars or vegetables”, he observed. Instead of ‘teacher quality’, he advocated the discussion should be instead focused on ‘teaching quality’.
Peter Job’s article on The Drum website picks up on an issue that has been debated since the nineteenth century. Is teaching like following a recipe – copy it from a book, apply each step to any class and expect that a learned student will emerge at the end of the allotted (cooking) time? Is the teacher a mere implementer of previously approved teaching methods learned by rote and applied without modification to every pupil? Or does a teacher’s training, ongoing professional development, teaching experience plus professional judgement lead to better learning outcomes for their students?
The Teaching Reading in Australia researchers examined this issue from a historical perspective. Research Associate Professor Phil Cormack (School of Education, University of South Australia) compared two systems of education that emerged in Britain during the industrial revolution (‘Reading Pedagogy, ‘Evidence’ and Education Policy: Learning from History?’ downloadable at the Teaching Reading in Australia website). The ‘monitorial system’ developed by Joseph Lancaster used the best performing students in a school to teach the other students by strictly adhering to a particular method of teaching invented by Lancaster and supervised by one head teacher in the large classroom. The purpose of this system was to enable mass education with the most efficient use of resources. There was no leeway to adapt the method of teaching to better suit particular students or to improve on it by innovation in the classroom. Continue reading →
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