The Lancaster school arranged peer time so every pupil hour taught or learned
Evidence
But it was probably in primary education that this adjustment of different chronologies was to be carried out with most subtlety. From the seventeenth century to the introduction, at the beginning of the nineteenth, of the Lancaster method, the complex clockwork of the mutual improvement school was built up cog by cog: first the oldest pupils were entrusted with tasks involving simple supervision, then of checking work, then of teaching; in the end, all the time of all the pupils was occupied either with teaching or with being taught. The school became a machine for learning, in which each pupil, each level and each moment, if correctly combined, were permanently utilized in the general process of teaching. One of the great advocates of the mutual improvement schools gives us some idea of this progress: ‘In a school of 360 children, the master who would like to instruct each pupil in turn for a session of three hours would not be able to give half a minute to each. By the new method, each of the 360 pupils writes, reads or counts for two and a half hours’ (cf. Bernard). — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 249
Categorization
- XREF: Peer-monitoring in the mutual improvement school is a direct institutional cousin of panoptic self-policing — subjects become each other’s supervisors, which is the same move Oceania’s telescreens externalize across society. — connects to: Nineteenth-century schools scheduled activities down to four-minute increments — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 230