Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth- Century America Author(s): Dell Upton Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 238- 253 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991147 . Accessed: 10/09/2014 13:01

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This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LancasterianSchools, Republican Citizenship,and the Spatial Imaginationin Early Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica

might have been expected to play an active political role in the Dell Upton, Universityof California,Berkeley new nation. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, In the opening years of the nineteenth century, Joseph however, American Friends withdrew dramatically and deci- Lancaster's pedagogy was adopted in the public schools of sively from all political action. Educational reform, along with most of the largest cities of the United States. By the middle of penal reform and the establishment of asylums of all sorts, the century, it had been discredited and abandoned. Neverthe- became an avenue for Friends to affect the course of society less, Lancasterian education (also called the mutual or monito- outside formal politics. rial system) linked the shaping of youthful character to specific In 1804, the Friend sent a copy spatial settings in a manner that bears reexamination in the of one of Lancaster's pamphlets to (1758-1827), light of current interest in the public realm. It has much to say a -born Quaker merchant living in . about the conceptions of public space and citizenship in the Eddy distributed a thousand copies of the tract in New York early years of the American republic. and Philadelphia, and in 1805 he persuaded the Quaker-led Joseph Lancaster (1778-1839) developed his method in the Free School Society to adopt the monitorial system in New York late 1790s for use in his Royal Free School in Borough Road, City.2 Influenced by Eddy's work in New York and by a London Southwark, London. The Borough Road school was a charity Friend named Benjamin Shaw, Philadelphia Quaker reformer school, and the poor were Lancasterian education's intended Roberts Vaux (1786-1836) engineered the introduction of subjects everywhere. The distinguishing feature of a Lancaste- Lancasterian instruction into that city's new public school sys- rian school was monitorial instruction. In a single, outsized tem in 1817.3 WhenJoseph Lancaster emigrated to the United classroom, enormous numbers of students were subdivided States in 1818, a lecture tour in the northeast, culminating in an into smaller groups, or classes, according to their level of address to Congress, bolstered the visibility and popularity of advancement. Under the eye of a monitor, a slightly more his ideas. Eventually, he opened a short-lived Lancasterian advanced student, each class recited its lessons at a semicircular Institute in to train prospective teachers.4 station, or draft, along the side walls of the schoolroom [Figure Through similarly personal networks, Lancasterianism dif- of 1]. The students were organized in hierarchical flights of classes fused from the large cities to the hinterlands. Knowing and monitors that ascended to the level of the teacher, who Vaux's advocacy of monitorial schools, for example, small-town oversaw the entire school and supervised the highest-ranking schoolmasters wrote to him for advice on school architecture monitors. and management.5 By the 1830s there were monitorial schools far north as Maine.6 Like many other social reform schemes in early nineteenth- as far west as St. Charles, Missouri, and as the official in New century America, Lancasterianism, and later Joseph Lancaster Lancasterianism was adopted as pedagogy himself, traversed the republic along a network of philanthro- York City (1805), Albany (1810), Georgetown (1811), Washing- Boston and pists who belonged to the Society of Friends, or . These ton, D.C. (1812), Philadelphia (1817), (1824), men and women were drawn to social reform by their belief that Baltimore (1829), and 's legislature considered Mutual instruction was also used in all people shared an "inner light," or divine spark, that might adopting it statewide.7 be cultivated to their own and society's benefit. Moreover, most Sunday schools, orphanages, houses of refuge (reform schools), cities.8 male Quaker reformers were well-to-do businessmen who and almshouses in the new nation's largest

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FIGUREI: Studentsreciting at drafts,Royal Free School, Borough Road, London, from Joseph Lancaster,The British System of Education(London, 1810), figure4. Note the portraitof George IIIand its caption, "The Patronof Education,and Friendof the Poor."

Lancaster's method found a willing audience among the hotbed of American Lancasterianism in the early nineteenth hard-nosed businessmen who created American public schools century, is representative. in the early nineteenth century. It offered a vision of citizenship, The Quaker City ballooned at a rate that worried many of its and of the ways in which citizens might be formed, that residents. Its population increased five times between 1750 and appealed to the leaders of a nation struggling to define 1800, or about 3.4 percent a year.'0 This urban population was republican citizenship. Those leaders were uncertain how increasingly fragmented: poor Scots-Irish and German immi- Americans would relate to one another in daily life, especially in grants and African Americans, newly freed by Pennsylvania's cities, but they were confident that carefully conceived spatial emancipation laws or by their own efforts in escaping from arrangements could direct civic life into appropriate channels. Southern slavery, swelled the city's underclass. And while in Lancasterianism was a strongly spatialized educational method 1800 the city as a whole was wealthier and its economy more whose distinctive characteristics and potential to create citizens flexible, diverse, and volatile than before the Revolution, suitable to a new society stimulated the republican spatial disparities of wealth were much greater as well. At the begin- imagination. ning of the nineteenth century, middle- and lower-class Phila- By spatial imagination I refer to a habit of thinking about delphians commanded a much smaller share of the city's social relationships physically. The spatial imagination envi- resources, their prospects were much shakier, and the eco- sions relationships among people as a synthesis of physical and nomic and cultural abyss between them and the urban elite was nonphysical qualities. It conjures up a kind of Platonic space much wider and more difficult to cross."1 that encompasses all possible connections, all desirable relation- The founders of the urban public schools of the United ships, at once. This fusion of the material and the nonmaterial States sat on the upper side of this divide. They were mostly can never be achieved in the real world, for the spatial merchants or retired merchants who believed the nation's imagination addresses the "ought-tos" rather than the "can- fortunes (and their own) depended on a strong economy and bes" of social and spatial life. The Lancasterian school was an an orderly civil society; but when they looked about them, they imaginary social space that could never be fully realized, but it believed they saw a city overrun with poor, unemployed, and resonated so intensely with the republican spatial imagination often unemployable men, women, and children who threat- that its disciples failed to shake off its spell long after its ened the nation's economic prosperity and its civic peace. impracticality had become apparent.9 Thomas Eddy, who introduced Lancasterianism to America, understood the connection. He considered both his political ECONOMY support of "Internal Improvements," or government-subsidized There are obvious reasons why mass public education of any economic infrastructure, and his promotion of schools and sort seemed so necessary in the new nation. Among them was other social institutions as complementary expressions of the the rapid socioeconomic stratification of its cities. The experi- same "improving spirit."'2 ence of Philadelphia, the largest American city in 1776 and a To those who knew the value of a dollar, who spoke a new

UPTON: LANCASTERIANSCHOOLS 239

This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions language of "worthy"and "unworthy"poverty, of wise or slightlymodified from the master'srecommendations [Figures wasted benevolence, moreover,monitorial schools seemed to 4, 5]. P.S. 17 was an 80-by-42-footrectangle, two storieshigh. offer mass educationat a popularprice throughfrugality on a One entire floor was given over to the grammarschool, with visionaryscale.13 "The simple fact, that 300 children,under the fourteen rows of benches facing a teacher'sdesk and utility superintendenceof a competent teacher,may be rapidlyand rooms at either end. The ground floor was divided into two efficiently instructed, in all the elementary branches of an rooms, for the infant and primaryschools. In Americancities, Englisheducation, for a sum of less than $2.50, each child, per infant schools, and sometimes primary schools, used the annum,is of itselfconclusive [of the value of Lancasterianism]," Pestalozzianmethod of instruction,which stressedthe simulta- wrotethe principalof Philadelphia'sModel School.14 neous mental and physicaldevelopment of the young child.16 Frugalitywas achieved by teaching the greatest possible Consequently,both the lowerrooms at P.S. 17 departed from numberof studentsin the largestpossible space with the fewest Lancaster'spreferred plan in the arrangementof their desks possible resources.The ideal Lancasterianclassroom was an and in the amount of open space left in the classroom.'7 undivided space, the larger the better. Lancaster recom- Baltimore'spilot Male SchoolNo. 3 (1830) was a 45-by-75-foot mended a "longsquare or parallelogram"in the proportionof building containing two ranks of twenty desks.'8 A crude 3:5 [Figure2]. The master'sdesk was to be placed on a platform prototypicalplan publishedby Boston'sschool trusteesshowed at one end, and the desks and forms (benches), fixed to a a nearly squareroom with only five ranksof desks, a master's sloping floor, should all face the platformto alloweye contact desk at one end, and drafts(recitation stations) along two sides with any studentat any time [Figure3]. The room shouldbe as [Figure6].19 open as possible,with ample spacebetween the rowsof desksto Philadelphia'sControllers of the Public Schools refined allowstudents to move withoutdisturbing each other:"There is Lancaster'srecommendations by moving the master'sdesk to no proprietyin fillinga room with timberwhen space is wanted the middle of a long wallin the city'sModel School (1818) and for children."15 in its SouthwarkSchool (1820) for girls [Figures7, 8]. The Americanschools followed this model in a generalway. The Model School's"oblong square"classroom was 80 feet by 40 New York Free School Society'smanual of 1820 reproduced and had three ranksof desks and benches separatedby 3-foot Lancaster'sideal plan, while the city'smanual of 1850 included aisles. Drafts 3 feet in diameter, set 18 inches apart, were plans of Public School 17, built in the 1840s on lines only markedout bywires along the sidewalls.20 In 1828,J. M. Patton of Milton,Pennsylvania, sent Lancasterianguru Roberts Vaux a plan of a new school that was obviouslybased on the Philadel- phia building [Figure9]. Patton's proposed schoolroom, a I. I 40-by-60-footspace, was arranged in threeranks often 14-inch- *i lb wide deskswith 10-inch-widebenches. These were separatedby 4 12-inchwalkways. At each end of the room, a 6-foot passage accommodatedthe "MonitersDraft Circles,"foot-high plat- forms on which classeswere to stand during recitations.The teachersat in the middle of the long side on a platformraised 2 feet from the floor, between the 3-foot-wide passages that separatedthe banksof desks.21Despite the innovationsin some of Philadelphia'sflagship schools, the oblong proportionsof the survivingMifflin School (1825) and photographsof demol- ished schools in the city, as well as the survivingbuilding in Georgetown,D.C. (1811) suggestthat for the most partAmeri- cans tended not to depart much from Lancaster'ssuggestions 'i ? I:~ [Figures10, 11, 12, 13].22 S,if ell CA t"i?iii:?_I~i ; Lancasterargued that the monitorialsystem was the most : i:i-io Iffim economical method of education because it allowed a single masterto educateup to 1,000 pupils in one enormousroom.23 Economies of scale comparableto that of the most efficient FIGURE2: Model Lancasterianclassroom, 18 I0, from Lancaster,British System of factory were available to those with the nerve to build in Education:figures I-2. At one end is the master's platform,with student entrances to sufficientlygrandiose dimensions.24 Londoner Benjamin Shaw either side of it and semicirculardrafts, or recitationstations, along the side walls. The scolded Philadelphia'sControllers of the Public Schools for dots represent the positions of individualstudents duringclassroom exercises. their timid model schoolroom:it was only 30 by 50 feet and

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FIGURE3: PhilipHooker, Lancaster-School-Housein the Cityof Albany, 18 15, from AmericanMagazine, 18 16, illustratingthe slopingfloor of the classroom would hold no more than 180 to 200 pupils. Such a plan, Shaw cally described as "well regulated noise.""30 Boys in the Model argued, "strikes at the root of Economy.... A School room School were allotted 18 inches of seat space each, while Patton's should be erected of dimensions sufficient to contain on one students luxuriated in 20-inch seats (about what one gets in the Floor, at least, 500 children because a less number will not economy section of today'scommercial airliner) on ranks of ensure an economic result & may consist of 2 Stories, one for benches only a foot apart. Yet in Joseph Lancaster'seyes, Boys & one for Girls,"thus achieving Lancaster's magic number American classrooms were overly spacious. The founder had of 1,000.25 written that "children confined in a small school-room, can no Although American school boards did not build to Lan- more be expected to be in order, than soldierscan perform caster's recommended scale, their classrooms were very their exercise without a parade," but he ridiculed Americans' large. Baltimore's Male School No. 3 was intended to seat 360 faintheartednessin packing in bodies.31Writing to Roberts boys.26The Patton plan for Milton, Pennsylvania, was intended Vaux, Lancastercompared his own spartan Baltimoreclass- to hold 250 children, while its inspiration, Philadelphia's Model room to "these philadelphia palaces which you call School was for In the School, designed 339.27 1833, Quaker City's rooms.'"32 school board reported as many as 386 children in some In an erawhen the managersof all kindsof publicinstitu- classrooms, and they ordered the construction of 40-by-80-foot tionssought to reducetheir per capitaexpenditures and even additions to all of their existing buildings to house Infant to realizea profit,if possible,from theirclients' labor, the Schools that would accommodate 300 of the youngest pupils in potentialeconomies of a systemwhere enormous numbers each.28 Whether the rooms ever held that many is open to of childrenin vast, bare classroomswere taughtby a few, question. An anonymous critic accused the Controllers of poorlypaid teacherswere a powerfulmotivation for Ameri- overreporting class sizes to disguise the schools' per capita cost. can public school officials. Nevertheless,economies of Although they claimed that 329 boys and 267 girls were scale alone cannot explain the appeal of the Lancasterian enrolled in the Model School in 1821, this critic said, he had school. never counted more than 150 of either sex present at one time!29 DISCIPLINE Even without 100 percent attendance, these were large, Lancasterians on both sides of the Atlantic eagerly seized on crowded rooms filled with what a Boston official euphemisti- monitorialinstruction as a promisingstrategy of socialorder. If

UPTON:LANCASTERIAN SCHOOLS 241

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FIGURE4: Public School No. 17, , after 1842, from John Franklin FIGURE5: PublicSchool No. 17, from Reigart,Lancasterian System, 26. Second-floor Reigart,The LancasterianSystem of Instructionin the Schoolsof New YorkCity (New plan, showing Lancasterianschoolroom York, 19 I6), 27. First-floor plan, showing primary department, containing infant schoolroom (B) and primaryschoolroom (A) the streets."35Here and in monitorial classrooms, Philadelphia industrialist James Ronaldson told Roberts Vaux, poor chil- anything, Americans were more enthusiastic about the system's dren would learn "not to break windows, riot on the street, potential than the founder himself. Where Joseph Lancaster break our fences, steal or take flowers & fruit; wait at play house wrote in general terms of the moral and religious benefits of doors & beg checks, abuse those weaker than [them]selves, and public schooling, American educators envisioned schools as the when [they] grow up [to] do [their] duty honestly."36 In short, mildest of several related instruments for regulating the poor. public schools were one of a kit of tools that also included, in John Ely, a Lancasterian teacher from Philadelphia, wrote that order of increasing severity, Sunday schools, almshouses, houses poor children were "a kind of vermin in society, which, if they of refuge, and penitentiaries. All were at the disposal of Eddy, cannot be reformed, should be removed from the streets."33 Vaux, Ronaldson, and their associates as members of the The Controllers agreed: mandatory public education was a way interlocking directorates that controlled all the public and to "rid our streets and wharves, and the immediate vicinity of private social institutions of the early republican city.37 the town, of the small children, who, either as beggars or petty To anarchy in the streets, the monitorial system opposed depredators, wander about to seek a pittance for the support of military discipline and hierarchy. As the trustees of the Albany, their indolent and worthless parents." These children could be New York, Lancasterian school wrote, monitorial education "is sent to the House of Refuge and their parents denied poor in imitation of the military. Its scholars are divided into classes relief.34 Yet poor children's refusal to attend was, as the corresponding to the platoon of a regiment."38 Monitors Controllers' statement grudgingly acknowledged, a result of proliferated like military officers: in Philadelphia there were the necessity to contribute to their families' support by the time draft monitors, class monitors, arithmetic monitors, reading they were seven or eight years old. In response, the Board of monitors, writing monitors, and dictating monitors to oversee Control set up infant schools, a kind of proto-kindergarten instruction, while pencil monitors and pass or yard monitors preceding Lancasterian education. Here educators hoped to maintained discipline under the oversight of a General Monitor receive "children generally uncorrupted, when their minds are of Order.39This image of military regimentation was irresistible susceptible of deep and lasting impressions, and when, but for to authoritarian republicans like John Ely, despite the notori- such institutions, they would be exposed to the contamination ous lack of discipline that characterized early republican mili- and corruption, necessarily attendant upon wandering through tias. Long before he became a Lancasterian, Ely had attempted

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This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions to form a regiment of a thousand boys who would march three to recognize the complex ways in which institutions such as the times weekly in Philadelphia's State House Yard.40 Lancasterian school used visual surveillance and bodily chore- In addition, the Lancasterian classroom was arranged so ography (which he, like the overseers of the Albany Lancaste- that all the desks faced the master, facilitating the visual rian school, grounded in military training) to instill social order surveillance of which Enlightenment social theorists were so by inscribing behavioral norms and social values within the fond. Lancaster claimed that students in conventional class- citizen. For Foucault, the clues to social power lay not in the rooms were "wholly or partly out of the master's sight" and had application of repressive force from without, but in the content "pretence for idleness and play," but that the monitorial and control of knowledge of oneself and others.43 schoolroom permitted easy "detection of offenders."41 Both the language of social control and the techniques of These terms in which Ely, Ronaldson, and the Philadelphia self-discipline were openly and explicitly proclaimed by Lancas- Controllers wrote of educating the poor revealed their impa- terians. Apparently natural hierarchies of learning, as well as tience with social deviance and their longing for a decisive the spaces within which these were acted out, were meant to solution to it. From this point of view, the Lancasterian school represent and reproduce the contingent hierarchiesof social was an instrument of social control. To be sure, the monitorial power. Still, to accountfor the appeal of Americanmonitorial school removed children from the streets, yet if we examine schools, their character as a spatial system, and the reasons they what went on in the classroom, rather than simply the relation- may have succeeded or failed, it is necessaryto move beyond ship of school to society, it is evident that Lancasterianism was the genericlanguage of socialcontrol and disciplinarytechnolo- not simply reactive. Instead, it was one of a constellation of gies. Lancasterian schools and other therapeutic institutions interrelated institutions that drew and defended the bound- did not arise from an abstract fondness for repression or power, aries of republican citizenship.42 The motive was to discipline but from a specific historic context, in which elites in a new the poor, while the strategy was to train the poor to discipline politicalsystem groped forways to makeit work.An isomorphic themselves. Bricks and mortar defined the boundaries of languageconnected politics,science, society, and space in ways citizenship, but boundaries were effective only when they were that made Lancasterian schools and their sister institutions inscribed within the citizen. appear to be effective solutions to the political and social The idea of external social control consequently gives way to questions that American republicans posed for themselves. a psychosocial notion of self-control. Michel Foucault taught us While the "therapeutic" vision of the Lancasterian school and its brother institutionswas Window Window undeniably repressive, it was a born of a 0 0 0 0 0 0 repression optimism, misguided attempt to recruit 0 6, 080 070o0 o o republican citizens from among the downtrodden. 000 000 O0 0 0 0 0 0 REPUBLICAN CITIZENSHIP 0 Out of the turmoil of the years between 1765 and 1787, C C= * m e- r--0 rI -o S o 0o0 republicanism emerged as the unifying political idea of the new ": :*= o • [ nation. The irreducible core of this "protean concept" was o o o0 or the notion that the ? o popular sovereignty, fundamental politi- .• * 0 cal rights enjoyed by all humans existed prior to political or social institutions as a perquisite of common membership in the 0 -o species. As humans, we lend sovereignty, or political power, to 0 0 0 the state rather than deriving our own powers after the fact from membership in a social class or estate countenanced by and dependent on the state, as theories 0 oo competing political 00 claimed.44 Republicans confronted two theoretical problems. First, the political health of a republic hinged on an articulation of 0 individual sovereignty that was consonant with the general good. While the idea of popular sovereignty presumed that citizens had the right to act freely, the idea of a republic as the Master's 0 0 Door Desk founders imagined it demanded that they had to act essentially 0 0 alike, in the interest of the common good. But how were natural FIGURE 6: Lancasterian Suggested schoolroom, Boston, redrawn from William freedom and social order to be reconciled? Republicans con- Russell,Manual Mutual of Instruction(Boston, 1826), 7 cluded that order in a republican polity must arise from within,

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FIGURE7: Model School, Philadelphia,18 18 (demolished); photograph, 1913, from FranklinDavenport Edmunds,The Public School Buildings of the Cityof Philadelphiofrom 1745 to 1845 (Philadelphia,1913), 52. from self-discipline-virtue, as it was called-rather than Newton later discarded this theory in favor a belief in direct being imposed from without: citizens must share com- divine intervention, it remained current among his follow- mon values. This raised the second dilemma: how could a ers, and it was available to curious Americans through republic of sovereign but unequal citizens develop common itinerant lecturers and published popular introductions to his values? How was the general good to be defined and pro- work.47 tected? The emergent liberal capitalism of the late eighteenth Early republicans applied modes of thought adapted from century incorporated this scientific narrative into its own. The contemporary science, economics, natural philosophy, and new political economy postulated a universal human principle religion to these questions about the nature of citizenship.45 of "sociableness and unsociableness" that was founded in the Science, economics, and theology all offered political thinkers instinct for self-preservation and that sought maximum per- models for understanding the mechanisms by which order sonal gain from any economic transaction. The chaotic, self- might emerge from apparent chaos. For example, Newtonian seeking decisions of individuals generated predictable, orderly natural philosophy-mathematics, physics, astronomy- faced patterns ofbehavior, so that a common good emerged automati- an analogous problem to that of political republicanism: how cally from the sum of individual goods. The historian Joyce 0. was one to explain the coordinated behavior of apparently Appleby has demonstrated how important this image was for independent physical bodies? Isaac Newton hypothesized the late eighteenth-century Americans. "The new economic rela- existence of an invisible aether or aethers, "each very subtle and tions," she states, "were undirected but patterned, uncoerced elastic, and 'some secret principle of unsociableness' and but orderly, free but predictable. They began to resemble-in the reverse, whereby particles, both of aether and of grosser men's minds at least-the operation of systems in the physical bodies, selectively flee and approach one another."46Although universe."48

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The importance of invisible, internalized regulation was creation, an invisible governor like those that controlled atoms familiar to many other Americans from more traditional chan- or economies.50 The difference from physics, economics, or nels, notably the Christian discourse of Providence and the even theology was that this moral gyroscope needed to be soul. It was particularly important to Quakers such as those who trained, like a muscle. This was the fundamental positive imported Lancasterianism and who believed in an "inner light" argument for mass education in a republican society, the that constituted direct human contact with divinity. For other complement of the repressive rhetoric of social control. As the Protestants, ideas of an essential human moral unity were Controllers of Philadelphia's Lancasterian schools noted, societ- reinforced by the eighteenth-century rise of evangelical reli- ies without universal education "risque the evils which for want gion, which preached a personal moral responsibility that of moral and scholastic instruction might result to society."51 required divine grace to succeed.49 In every case, some essence--a soul, an inner light, a moral In place of the soul, secular and nonsectarian thinkers often faculty, or a vaguer "principle of sociableness and unsociable- postulated an innate moral faculty built into all humans at ness"-linked discrete players and insured that their individual

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FIGURE9: J. M. Patton, plan of proposed Lancasterianschool for Milton, Pennsylvania, I April 1828 actions would accord with others'. In short, parallel explanatory ries based on essential similarities among disparate compo- patterns (modes of thought) enabled republicans to cast the nents; and articulated, or characterized by flexible and discontinuous realms of science, commerce, theology, and individually manipulable relationships. ethics into a single metaphorical system that could explain how A monetary reform proposal byJohn Dorsey, Philadelphia's sovereign individuals might be expected to act freely but in keeper of weights and measures and a sometime architect, was concert through the operation of an internalized self-regula- so preposterous in its premises that it makes the emblematic tion. These metaphors became what historian Jean Starobinski process by which the republican spatial imagination fused the has called emblems,transcendent images that bridge the chasm visible and the invisible readily evident. In 1818, the year the between the concrete and the abstract, investing metaphor with city's Lancasterian schools opened, Dorsey proposed to reduce tangibility and specificity.52 the material and economic worlds to simple equivalences. If invisible coordination was a key metaphor, visible order Beginning from a mundane empirical observation-that a was its complement. A sense of context, a view of the whole cubic foot of water at 600 F. weighed 1,000 ounces avoirdupois, within which the selfwas located, maintained individual perspec- a nice round figure-Dorsey proposed to "establish an uniform tive and maximized social effectiveness in a republic. Republi- System-and by it to reconcile the Unit of Weight, the Unit of cans meant this quite literally: they imagined republican society Lineal Measure-the Unit of measure of Capacity & the spatially. It was transparent,or open to inspection and under- Money Unit of the UStates." Seduced by the essentialism that standing by all comers; classified,or ordered by uniform catego- lay behind the idea of invisible coordination and by the

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FIGURE10: RinggoldSchool, Philadelphia,1832 (demolished). The cupola is characteristicof the republicanfascination with bells as emblems of coordinatedmovement. The similarity to the MifflinSchool (Figures I I, 12) suggeststhat Philadelphiahad devised a standardizedschool planby the mid- I820s. Compare, as well, the planof New York'sP.S. 17 (Figure5). materialismof early republican thinking, Dorsey wished to ings could be an importanttool for creatingrepublican citizens legislatea universal,fixed relationshipamong the mass,dimen- if social,political, and economicrelationships could be ordered sion, and monetaryvalue of any substance.53 One cubicinch of into neat, universal,one-to-one physical relationships as Dorsey anythingat allwould, by fiat,weigh one ounce and be worthten wishedto do for volume,mass, and value. cents. In a stroke, the entire world was made transparent, articulated,and subjectedto a universalclassification system. REPUBLICAN EDUCATION Dorsey'sproposal embodied the earlyrepublican spatial imagi- WhatJohnDorsey fantasized, Joseph Lancasternearly realized. nation at its most fanciful. The key to Lancaster'spedagogy was a 1:1:1 articulation For educatorsand other socialreformers, the moralfaculty, among a child, a unit of knowledge,and the materialworld. variouslydescribed as an organ or physiologicalentity of some Lancasterconceived knowledge as a simple,layered system that sort,was affected by the environmentand consequentlymade it might be reducedto its constituentparts for studentconsump- possible to influencehuman values somatically,mediating the tion. For example, studentsof readingfirst learned to form the moraland the physical,the invisibleand the visible,republican charactersof the alphabet correctly,then moved on to one- citizenshipand republicanspace. For thisreason, visible spatial letter words, followed by two-letterwords, three-letterwords, orderwas particularlyimportant. The body'sphysical surround- and so on up to the highest level, where they read "the Bible

UPTON:LANCASTERIAN SCHOOLS 247

This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 54 and other select books." Students of arithmetic first learned --:--iii--ii;iii~-ii-;; -iii;-i:;-;i---:_i; ;:i:i - to form numbers, progressed to addition, subtraction, multipli- and and in :-i _ cation, division, finally, Philadelphia, at least, .:i: .;; ; . ..; iiii:-ii;ii:iiiiiii:: -; iiiiiiiiiiii-_- iii._ ;-iiiii-ii-iii?iiii--:i: ;-;i:-_i i ;__:;; :.:i _i: ;: ;;;___ iiiiiiiii-ii_-i:-_:___i:__:I.:__. i-iii;i.__-_.__:_: became acquainted with "Federal Money" and the principles of simple and compound interest.55 Teachers--or rather, moni- tors-were not to students to level of iiiiiiiii iiiiiliiiiiiiii-:-:_iiii-i-_.-?;-:? _;_-?;i. iiii . iiiii ; -i-ii expose any knowledge iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-?:iiiiiii-iiiiiiiii--i-:;-:-ii-iiiiiiiiiiliiiiiiriii ; iiii:i.;::ili..- iiiii;iiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiliiii;i-ii-ii::-i-j:iiiiiiiiiiiii::i:i-iiiiiiiiiliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii until they had mastered the ones below it.56 'i?i-i?i.-:-.-:-;--i-iii?-::-.:-: Although monitorial schoolrooms were large, open build- iiiiiii-iiiii~ii"iiiiii:;i;iiiili::ii:-i ings, they were complex, carefully considered spaces that ; i- ?: .? . i ordered these relationships between pupils and knowledge iiiiii--iij;--::-i_:i:,_-;i:-i:-i:-s:-? emblematically. The key to the system "which must never be iiiii:iiii-iiiiiiiiiii.iiiiiiiiiiiiiiliiiiii-ii;--:i~iiiiiiii:ii:_:-----;;;-i departed from," Lancaster wrote, "is, A PLACE FOR EVERY THING, AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE."57 Among the most notorious of Lancaster's spatial devices were the communal books that he promoted as cost-conscious innovations. "It will be remembered," he wrote, "that the usual mode of teaching requires every boy to have a book: yet, each boy can only read or spell one lesson at a time in that book... and whilst the is a lesson on one of the book, :?:;iiiiililiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii:iiiiiiiiiii_-.;::_iiiiiiiiii-__iiiiiiiii boy learning part e;s~--~~~~-?I ic*e I-~:-- i ?!.-' __ i ?? '? ?~?~?-?i- the other parts are at that time useless." Consequently, Lan- B;I?~,i?~.~.?~~:?,~'~"""""" caster recommended breaking down books into large-print FIGURE I I: MifflinSchool, Philadelphia,1825; photograph 1912, from Edmunds, cards that could be used by several pupils at once when affixed PublicSchool Buildings, 68 to the walls or to stands.58 In dismembering the book, Lancaster reduced an intangible were organized spatially so that their contents could be redistrib- body of knowledge-the English language as a sign system uted to individual pupils. Lancasterianism thus instilled repub- denoting abstract concepts-to discrete, effectively interchange- lican citizenship-independent but coordinated action arising able parts. The parts were then dispersed among cards that from shared values-by reversing it in the classroom. Each

SW,44?:: .. :- _~~~:~i_::::--' :::?'- -'-:~:?-:::~': h:-ya-~;A4 iizii~1;:,--:~~-,:~---;;,i-:-i:A wi;n~~u

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FIGURE12: Mifflin School in 1987

248 JSAH / 55:3, SEPTEMBER 1996

This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions morsels of knowledge - were made visible and ranked. In addition, the ephemeral nature of achievement, the possibility of being dethroned at any time, gave schooling a dynamic quality that was reinforced by the careful patterns of movement Iv, its, e. by which students were to move from their desks to the drafts. It also appealed to the keen early-nineteenth-century sense of the ~~L8v volatility of fortune and social standing...... Lancasterianism was fuzzier than this account makes it appear. In the first place, only reading, and, to a lesser extent, arithmetic, could be neatly dismembered by Lancaster'smethod. History, geography, grammar, and (for girls) sewing and knitting were taught as well, but no mention was made of how they might be adapted to the system. Instead, American Lancasterians seized on the example of one-letter, two-letter, and three-letter words to explain their pedagogy. In the second place, the membership of the small classes and intra-class rankings changed from subject to subject. If students were to sit with their classes but were to be grouped into different classes for every subject, the neat patterns of movement in the monitorial classroom could not work. Lancaster's patterned movements show how deeply his system was the product of a spatial imagination that overlooked the practicalities of class- room management and circulation and the heterogeneous character of human knowledge. Yet this materialist vision of education sparked the republi- can spatial imagination. Philadelphia's school board created a specific functionary, the General Monitor of Order, to imple- ment the "place for everything" rule.60 Boston's school trustees repeated Lancaster's dictum that classes be regrouped for every subject, but they also accepted the customary mapping of FIGURE13: LancasterSchool, Georgetown, D.C., 181 I, in 1987. The cornerstone in classes onto rows of benches, a practice that again precluded the lower rightcorner of the facade reads "The LancasterSchool 181 ." the fluidity Lancaster envisioned: "Each row of desks, (and there are eight or ten,) is called a class; and each of these classes student was taught the same thing, but each learned it individu- writes a different word, because each studies a different spelling ally. Common knowledge was disassembled for consumption lesson.""61 and reassembly by each student. Boston Lancasterian William Russell envisioned an all- The monitorial classroom also served as a laboratory for encompassing choreography by which every movement was examining some of the conceptual uncertainties of liberal closely regulated. Students moved about at the monitors' capitalist republicanism. It showed that one could accept commands of "'Ready!,' then 'Rise!' 'Walk!'" During writing inequality and yet expect sovereign individuals to be governed lessons, the monitors ordered " 'Takeslates.' Each child lays his by common values. The simple image of a school where facts slate before him - 'Cleanslates.' Each child rubs until the bell were so many pennies, to be deposited in student piggy banks sounds for all to stop together, and put their hands behind at until nickels, dimes, and dollars of knowledge accumulated, the same instant" [Figure 14]. During recitations, all started on figured the essential sameness, the invisible regulation of all signal, and all fell silent on signal "even if a word is half while it also a republican citizens, offered way to compare them. pronounced."'62In Philadelphia, students moved at the sound As they recited their lessons, Lancasterian pupils were con- of a large bell along a wire-marked path to their drafts, where stantly evaluated and ranked among their peers. They stood at they lined up on their drafts facing away from the wall. The their monitorial drafts in the order of their proficiency. The signal of a small bell turned them around, another ended the best wore a medal labeled "First Boy" (or girl) that he or she lesson, and a final signal from the large bell sent them back to retained until dethroned during the same or a subsequent their benches.63 - lesson.59 In this way, the invisible attributes of students their These images, in countless variations, pervade early nine-

UPTON:LANCASTERIAN SCHOOLS 249

This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions i ~I~ it 1i i~i i, : ::i 'ii: i!r 1 i ~:? X V ? la t :: i r i : ):i iiit i i i i1! i t I r :r i 'iii i I I I-iii i ,, i iliil I i i! r i j i ',!. ?!?'j : : r r f iii:i i I :: i : : r i :: ?riil II jj I )f ii ii .iii ?1 i i , irI i i iii i i itli i ii SiI jliilf Ii f I II 1i i ii i f! :I I i 1I: 1 ii :( i iI " i !11i )5 r i j //1! L iii i i i i I i rri iii i ~jf I : L i ii I I I f 5 i; j iI I i ii i:I: r: i'' j liil i rrI , i: , : : I: t i i i r ii j i ri r r 1 ti i 1 E 1 I rII j iii I i : iitllr; : i ii i:liI 1i rr II : : 1 i ii: r ; Q ii ii i i i Ji! i: i I111 1 :: rIjii 1' i ri I t ; i i iiii'ii i ii Ii iI 1:i1 ~ I rt iI1 i' iir I 61.j"t ii I I i tsi 1 f i i 1 1 I~ : : :i I1 i I i i r i I ii : : : t i ii i I I ij ::1 i ii i i/i I j ii I It I j 1I jj f iI I I i i'! i ij r I iIi I 1 iiili1!1 f I : : i i cr r 1ji :,:: I i ii!i'!: i : : I:':' f :li! : ii f 1 I b I ii :Ii j :: :i i i Iii r i i j)i j jj i ii fj IiI !III i i!' ,I ?? i" f : d ?? ::r 91:i ?i~s~fi ? ?! j i I i a iTf~I1 i r~?.: /jjji :I: ii i i r : i! ~ r i

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FIGURE14: RoyalFree School, Borough Road, London,from Lancaster,British System, frontispiece. Choreographed movement: studentsshow their monitor what they have written on their slates ("LongLive the King").

teenth-century American social literature and constitute a dance of life could embody and instill moral values. In the critical element of the republican spatial imagination. Moral institutions that shaped or reshaped republicans, coordinated self-regulation translated directly into a choreographed land- movement formed character. Training to be citizens, Lancaste- scape.6 The physiological basis of morality implied that the rian students spoke and moved as one. Having failed at

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FIGURE15: State Penitentiary,Auburn, New York, from John W. Barber and Henry Howe, HistoricalCollections of the State of New York(New York, 1842), 78. Republican choreographyin itstherapeutic aspect: prisoners march in lockstep.

250 JSAH / 55:3, SEPTEMBER 1996

This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions citizenship, adult convicts were reeducated through coordi- convicts, Lancasterian pupils left no known responses to their nated silence and kinetic techniques such as the lockstep, a experience. Yet low enrollments, truancy, and general youthful close-order march in which prisoners moved under their own and parental indifference, all prompted by the exigencies of power but so closely together that they had to mimic everyone earning a living and widespread, if imperfectly articulated, else's movements or fall down [Figure 15]. The Lancasterian lower-class antielitism, certainly count as a response. So does drill and the prisoners' lockstep were highly aestheticized, the dismantling of Lancasterian education in the middle of the titillating glimpses of what republican society might be. The nineteenth century. It failed, in part, because the theoretical dream's fulfillment could be glimpsed in the erect postures and elegance of the system overlooked the messiness of human controlled movement of genteel citizens in the street and in the learning. It failed because students learned little in monitorial bell-coordinated discipline that civilians such as factory workers classrooms, for monitorial education's proponents miscon- and even hotel guests shared with schoolchildren, convicts, and ceived the nature of language and intellect. Most of all, it failed inmates of all sorts of asylums.65 for the same reason that it initially succeeded: because it was a Indeed, the sheer numbers of public and private, commer- product of the spatial imagination, a constellation of meta- cial and ceremonial, penal and therapeutic spaces, organized phors, a fervently utopian vision of republican society, dis- along similar lines and intended to promote similar kinds of guised as a pedagogy. The focus on system and order obscured behavior, dramatize the sweep of the republican spatial imagi- the needs of individual students. nation. Houses, offices, shopping arcades, public markets, In response, parents and students opted out. Authorities in hotels, cemeteries, prisons, hospitals, and asylums were among Philadelphia and New York were never able to recruit or retain the many building and spatial types created or reshaped by the enough competent monitors from the student body. Philadel- republican spatial imagination.66 Of them all, the penitentiary, phians resorted to roving "Assistant Tutors" to compensate, the school, and the urban grid were singled out as the while New York officials were thwarted by the courts in their landmarks that triangulated the limits of republican space. attempt to declare monitors indentured servants bound to the Prisoners, schoolchildren, and ordinary citizens panto- school board until their twenty-first birthdays.68 In Baltimore, mimed individual sovereignty articulated with the common the monitors' parents angrily withdrew them from the schools, good on a series of carefully devised playing fields. Self-directed fearing that their own educations were being sacrificed to their adult citizens exercised their circumscribed freedom in the civic monitorial duties.69 grid, which came to be interpreted in the early nineteenth One by one, urban school boards abandoned Lancasterian century as a dynamic but neutral framework that specified no instruction: Philadelphia surrendered in 1831, Baltimore in uses and emphasized no sites in advance, a landscape that 1839, and the District of Columbia in 1844. In 1853, New York, could accommodate and articulate the maximum number of the first to importJoseph Lancaster's method, became the last disparate uses into a transparent, all-encompassing order. The major city to give it up.70 grid gently directed the flow of republican life, like the stage markings in a theater.67 When citizens erred, the grid's bound- aries hardened into the walls of the cell, which constrained, Notes I This was first at a rather than merely guided, action. In the open classrooms of paper presented symposium, "Defining the Greater Good: Architecture and Institutions," at the Department of Architecture, the Lancasterian school, the lines of the grid were visible in the University of British Columbia, in 1995. I am grateful to the organizers of the rows of benches and the wire-marked routes that marked out symposium, David Vanderburgh and Deborah Weiner, and to the members of the patterns of movement in and out, to and from the drafts. While Berkeley Americanists' Reading Group (Richard Hutson, Margaretta M. Lovell, Donald McQuade, Kathleen Moran, and Wolf) and the these boundaries were more restrictive than those of the civilian Bryan J. anonymousJSAH reviewer for their valuable comments. grid, they were softer than those of the penitentiary, for school Basic expositions of Lancasterianism include Lancaster's own The British Education: a the and officials had faith that education would mold pupils into Systemof Being CompleteEpitome of Improvements Inventions Practisedat the Royal Free Schools, Borough-Road, Southwark(London, 1810), as citizens who carried their boundaries themselves. In the within well as Carl F. Kaestle, ed.,Joseph Lancasterand the Monitorial SchoolMovement: A monitorial school, the articulation that Americans relied on DocumentaryHistory (New York, 1973); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: CommonSchools and American 1780-1860 grids and cells to enforce in the adult world was wired into the Society, (New York, 1983), 40-44; and Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedomand Control in the student: the student became his or her Origin of own cell. In short, more ModernBuilding Types(New York, 1993), 56-66. 2 than economy, more than its illusory efficiency, more than Samuel L. Knapp, The Lifeof ThomasEddy; Comprising an ExtensiveCorrespon- dence with Many the Most and This and social control in the simplistic sense, Joseph Lancaster's peda- of DistinguishedPhilosophers Philanthropistsof OtherCountries (New York, 1834), 42, 54, 164-165, 206; John Franklin Reigart, suited a vision. gogy specific, highly spatialized political It The LancasterianSystem of Instructionin the Schoolsof New YorkCity (New York, offered a tangible model of the type of society that the 1916), 1-2. 3Benjamin Shaw, London, to Controllers of the Public republican elite craved. Schools, Philadelphia, 16 April 1818, Roberts Vaux Papers [VP], Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Unlike hotel urbanites, guests, cemetery visitors, and even Benjamin Shaw, London, to Roberts Vaux, Philadelphia, 27 November 1818,

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This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions VP; "Systemof GeneralEducation," Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania13 (1834): 26Kurtze,"'School House,"'" 73. 147. 27Rhees, Pocket Manual, 4, 8. 4 CharlesW. Thomson, Diary Desultorum,or a Journal of Passing Events 28 "Reportof the Controllersof PublicSchools," Hazard's Register ofPennsylva- [Diary, 1818-1843], MS., New-YorkHistorical Society, 26 April 1819; also nia 13 (1834): 174. NewYork school officials claimed that some of theirteachers SamuelEmlen, Burlington, N.J., to Vaux, 15 October1818, VP; Peter E. Kurtze, instructed300 infantsor 400 older pupils at one time, while a correspondent "'ASchool HouseWell Arranged': Baltimore Public Schools on the Lancasterian told Vauxthat Cincinnati'sschool held 250 childrenin a class.The Georgetown Plan, 1829-1839," in Gender,Class, and Shelter:Perspectives in Vernacular schoolhouse was reported to accommodate between 350 and 500 pupils. Architecture,V, ed. ElizabethCollins Cromley and CarterL. Hudgins (Knoxville, (EdwardS. Abdy,Journal of a Residenceand Tourin the UnitedStates of North 1995),70. America,fromApril, 1833, to October1834, 3 vols. [London, 1835], 1: 6; Reigart, 5WmAugustus Muhlenberg, Lancaster, Pa., to Vaux, 11 February1823, 14 LancasterianSystem, 31; Coudy Raquet,Cincinnati, to RobertsVaux, 15 June January 1822, 25 June 1822;J. M. Patton,Milton, Pa., to Vaux, 1 April 1828; 1821,VP; Proctor, "Joseph Lancaster," 6.) Coudy Raquet, Harrisburg,Pa., to Vaux, 30 March 1821; Coudy Raquet, 29Lancasterian, Letter to the Editor,American Sentinel, 23 February1822, Cincinnati,toVaux, 15June 1821, all inVP. clippingsent to RobertsVaux for his comment,VP. 6TimothyFlint, Recollections ofthe Last Ten Years, Passed in OccasionalResidences 30 Russell,Manual, 32. andJourneyingsin the Valleyof theMississippi, from Pittsburg and theMissouri to the 31 Lancaster,British System, 2. GulfofMexico,andfrom Florida to the Spanish Frontier (Boston, 1826), 185;"System 32JosephLancaster, Baltimore, to RobertsVaux, Philadelphia, 30June 1821, of GeneralEducation," 189. VP. 7First Biennial Report ofthe Trustees and Instructer ofthe Monitorial School, Boston 33JohnEly, Adelphi School, to RobertsVaux, 4June 1817,VP. The Adelphi (Boston, 1826); Kaestle,Pillars, 42; John Claggett Proctor,"Joseph Lancaster School was a private,Quaker-supported institution for the educationof poor and the LancasterianSchools in the Districtof Columbia,with Incidental School AfricanAmerican boys. (Philadelphia in 1824 [Philadelphia,1824], 131.) Notes," Recordsof the ColumbiaHistonrical Society of Washington,D.C. 25 (1923): 34 FourthAnnual Report of theControllers of thePublic Schools of theFirst School 1-35; "Systemof GeneralEducation," 97-103, 122-125, 132-135, 146-147, Districtof the Stateof Pennsylvania.With Their Accounts (Philadelphia, 1822), 4; 189, 235-238, 331-333, 391-393,410-412; Kurtze,"'School House,'" 70. EighthAnnual Report ofthe Controllers ofthe Public Schools ofthe First School District of 8 Paul Boyer, UrbanMasses and MoralOrder in America,1820-1920 (Cam- theState ofPennsylvania: With TheirAccounts (Philadelphia, 1826), 6-7. bridge,Mass., 1978), 49-50. 35 Tothe Senate and House ofRepresentatives ofthe Commonwealth ofPennsylvania: 9This essayfocuses less on understandingLancaster's entire system,and still theMemorial of the Subscribers,Citizens of the Cityand Libertiesof Philadelphia,29 less on sortingout the arcanaofwhat he did and did not appropriatefrom other November 1829 (Philadelphia,1830). The primalinnocence of young children people (whichinspired acrimoniouspamphlet wars among Lancasterand his wasa centraltenet of Pestalozziantheory. (Kaestle, Pillars, 87.) On infantschools, competitors),than on examining the aspectsof his programsthat appealed to see Kaestle,Pillars, 47-51. Americans. 36JamesRonaldson to RobertsVaux, 6 April 1829, VP. By begging checks, 10Gary B. Nash and BillyG. Smith,'"The Population of Eighteenth-Century Ronaldsonreferred to poor children'spractice of solicitingticket stubs from Philadelphia,"Pennsylvania Magazine ofHistory and Biography 99 (1975):362-368. theaterpatrons who leftperformances early. These allowedthe childrento enter 11"Thomas M. Doerflinger,A VigorousSpirit of Enterprise:Merchants and the theater,which was widely believed to be an immoralplace. EconomicDevelopment in RevolutionaryPhiladelphia (Chapel Hill, 1986), 36, 37Vaux, for example, was a prime mover in the EasternState Penitentiary, 38-39, 68, 157-158, 242-245, 284-334, 342-343; BillyG. Smith,The "Lower the Friends'Insane Asylum, and the House of Refuge as well as the public Sort":Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca,1990), pp. 63, 66, 68, schools,and a memberof the boardor benefactorof manysimilar institutions. 84-91, 124-125; Gary B. Nash, The UrbanCrucible: Social Change, Political 38Russell, Manual ofMutual Instruction, 105-106. See the militaristicdescrip- Consciousness,and the Origins ofthe American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), tion of the monitorialsystem, possibly written by Lancasterhimself, in Vindication 250, 252-254, 257-259; SharonV. Salinger,"Artisans, Journeymen, and the ofMr.Lancaster's System, 32; alsoKaestle, ed.,joseph Lancaster, 16-17. Transformationof Laborin LateEighteenth-Century Philadelphia," William and 39Rhees, Pocket Manual, 21-23. MaryQuarterly 3d ser., 40 (1983):69-74. 40Elizabeth Drinker, The Diary ofElizabeth Drinker, ed. ElaineForman Crane, '2Knapp, Life of ThomasEddy, 42-54 and passim. 3 vols. (Boston, 1991),2:1290 (11 April 1800). 130On the novelty of the idea of worthy and unworthypoor in the early 41 Lancaster,British System, 2. nineteenthcentury, see MichaelB. Katz,In theShadow of thePoorhouse: A Social 42 The most importantwork in thisvein, althoughit does not treatschools, is Historyof WelfareinAmerica (NewYork, 1986), 9-10, 12, 18, 24-25. DavidJ. Rothman,The Discovery ofthe Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in theNew 14J. L. Rhees,A PocketManual ofthe Lancasterian System ofEducation, in ItsMost Republic(Boston, 1971). ImprovedState: As Practisedin theModel School, First School District, Pennsylvania 43Hubert L. Dreyfusand PaulRabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism (Philadelphia,1827), 3. and Hermeneutics(2d ed.; Chicago, 1983), 126-167, 178-195;J. G. Merquior, 15 Lancaster,British System, 2. Foucault(Berkeley, 1985), 85-118. The key text for my argument is Michel '6 Kaestle,Pillars, 87. Foucault,Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan(New 17 Reigart,Lancasterian System, 24-29. York, 1977). Militarydiscipline is discussed on pp. 151-156, while ecoles i Kurtze,"'School House,' "73. mutuelles,the French version of Lancasterianeducation, are mentioned in '9William Russell, Manual of Mutual Instruction; Consisting of Mr. Fowle's passing on p. 150. Directionsfor Introducing in Common Schools the Improved SystemAdopted in the 4 Gordon S. Wood, The Creationofthe AmericanRepublic, 1776-1787 (Chapel MonitorialSchool, Boston (Boston, 1826), 6-7. Hill, 1968); Joyce O. Appleby, Liberalismand Republicanism in the Historical 20 Rhees, PocketManual, 4, 8. Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 292-293, 297(quote)-298, 305-306; 21 Patton to Vaux. Robert E. Shalhope, 'Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an 22 Philadelphia's Lancasterian schools were cataloged, and many illustrated, Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," William and in Franklin Davenport Edmunds, The Public School Buildings of the City of Mary Quarterly3d ser., 29 (1972): 49-80; Robert E. Shalhope, "Republicanism Philadelphiafrom 1745 to 1845 (Philadelphia, 1913). While Edmunds provided and Early American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 39 valuable information about dates, costs, and locations, the architectural data (1982): 334-356; Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Con- were confined to photographs of extant buildings and site plats. He recorded cept,"Journal ofAmericanHistory 79 (1992): 11-38. building size as cubic volume and internal arrangements as they were at the time 4 By modes of thought I mean habits of mind and patterns of explanation of his writing, after the big Lancasterian schoolrooms had been subdivided. common to all the disciplines that were adopted as metaphors for explaining the 23A Vindicationof Mr. Lancaster'sSystem of Education, from the Aspersions of way individual sovereignty and the common good might be articulated in ProfessorMarch, the Quarterly,British, and Anti-JacobinReviews, &c. &c. bya Member republican citizenship. of the Royal Institution(London, 1812), 21; Knapp, Life of ThomasEddy, 209. 46Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in RevolutionaryAmerica 1735-1789 24Kaestle, ed.,joseph Lancaster, 11-14; Markus, Buildings and Power, 56. (Chapel Hill, 1956), 346; J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics 25 Shaw to Controllers of the Public Schools. (Berkeley, 1982), 44 (quote).

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This content downloaded from 132.206.23.24 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:01:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 47Heilbron,Elements, 44-45, 61-62; I. BernardCohen, BenjaminFranklin's 59Lancaster, British System, 7-8, 54; Rhees,Pocket Manual, 14-15. Science(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 40-60;John C. Greene,AmercanScience in the 60oRhees, Pocket Manual, 22. Age ofJefferson(Ames, Ia., 1984), 20. The discussionof essentialismin this and 61 FirstBiennial Report of... theMonitorial School, 9. the followingparagraphs is based on Dell Upton, "AnotherCity: The Urban 62 Russell,Manual, 17-19. 63 CulturalLandscape in the EarlyRepublic," in EverydayLife in theEarly Republic, Rhees,Pocket Manual, 9, 26. ed. CatherineE. Hutchins(Winterthur, Del., 1994),65-67. 64 On choreographicimages of social life, see Dell Upton, HolyThings and 48Appleby,Liberalism and Republicanism,305-307; Joyce O. Appleby,Eco- Profane:AnglicanParish Churches in ColonialVirginia (New York, 1986), part 3. nomicThought and Ideologyin Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Princeton, 1978); 65John Kasson,Rudeness and Civility:Manners in Nineteenth-CenturyUrban Joyce O. Appleby, Capitalismand a New Social Order:The Republican Visionof the America(New York, 1990), 7, 30, 93-94, 99; Richard L. Bushman, The 1790s (NewYork, 1984),33 (quote). RefinementofAmerica: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), 63-69; Kenneth 49RhysIsaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (ChapelHill, 1982), L. Ames, Deathin theDining Room and OtherTales of VictorianCulture (Philadel- 263-264, 309-311. phia, 1992), 186-187, 206-213; Rhees,Pocket Manual, 11, 26. 5?Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost Worldof ThomasJefferson (Boston, 1948), 66 For brief discussionsof some of these other spatial types, see Upton, 111-116; Appleby,Capitalism, 19, 25, 78. "AnotherCity," 61-117. 51 FirstAnnual Report of the Controllersof the PublicSchools of the FirstSchool 67For more extended discussionof the grid'smeaning in the earlyrepublic, DistrictofPennsylvania; with Their Accounts (Philadelphia, 1819), 4. see Upton, "AnotherCity," 67-71; and Dell Upton, '"TheCity as Material 52Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray Culture,"in TheArt and Mystery of HistoricalArchaeology: Essays in HonorofJames (Cambridge,Mass., 1988). Deetz,ed. Anne E. Yentsch and MaryC. Beaudry(Boca Raton, Fla., 1992), 53JohnDorsey to WilliamJones, Presidentof the Second Bankof the United 53-56. States, n.d. [c. 1818], WilliamJones Papers, Uselma Clark Smith Collection, 68 Rhees,Pocket Manual, 4-5; Reigart,Lancasterian System, 97. HistoricalSociety of Pennsylvania. 69Kurtze, "'School House,' " 75. 54 Lancaster,British System, 3-4; Rhees,Pocket Manual, 12. For the use of this 70oSam Bass Warner,Jr., ThePrivate City: Philadelphia in ThreePeriods of Its method in otherAmerican schools, see Reigart,Lancasterian System, 41-42; First Growth(2d ed.; Philadelphia, 1987), 116; Kurtze, "'School House,'" 75; BiennialReport of... theMonitorial School (see n. 7), 8-9. Proctor,"Joseph Lancaster," 13; Reigart, Lancasterian System, 1. 55Rhees,Pocket Manual, 15-16. 56Lancaster, British System, 7. 57Lancaster, British System, 3. 58 Lancaster,British System, 12-13. For Americancomments: First Biennial Illustration Credits Reportof... the MonitorialSchool, 29-30; Reigart, LancasterianSystem, 44. Figures 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14. Library Company of Philadelphia. WilliamRussell doubted the economicneed for communalbooks in the United Figure3, 15. Libraryof Congress States,although he recognizedtheir value in creatinga uniformspatial system of Figure6. ZeynepKezer knowledge.Philadelphia's schools did use them. (Russell,Manual, 10; Rhees, Figure9. VauxPapers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania PocketManual, 10, 14.) Figures12, 13.Author

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