America’s First Failed Education Reform
From Forbes.com
“America,” writes historian Adam Laats, “has never been willing to learn its lesson.”
In his most recent book, he writes of an education movement that is filled with familiar features. A promise to educate the poor and thereby lift them out of poverty. A scripted program that could be used to scale up the program. New technology to that would both boost education and reduce costs. Expectations of revolutionary savings because of revolutionary efficiency. And in the end, a systemic inadequacy that should have been obvious from the beginning, but was ignored by reformers who just really wanted to believe in a huckster’s confident promises.
Mr. Lancaster’s System is the story of Joseph Lancaster’s school system, how it failed, and how it set the stage for public education in the United States.
Both the promises and the failure are familiar. And it all happened 200 years ago.
Joseph Lancaster was an abusive and shameless egotist who brought his educational system to the United States in 1818 primarily because he had worn out his welcome in Great Britain (He proved to be, says Brittanica, “vain, rash, and extravagant”). In Laats’s telling, it appears that Lancaster intended that his system would bring him the wealth and renown that he felt his genius justly deserved.