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The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David Hogan
David Hogan*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

Esteem and disgrace are of all the others, the most powerful incentives to the mind, when once it is brought to relish them. If you can once get into children a love of credit, and an apprehension of shame and disgrace, you have put into them the true principle, which will constantly work, and incline them to the right. But it will be asked, How shall this be done? John Locke

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to [its] proper objects. Adam Smith

Recent reports on the state of American education underline again and again the importance of competitive individualism in contemporary classrooms and the extraordinary uniformity of classroom organization and pedagogy across the country. John Goodlad, for example, reports that despite “the rhetoric of individual flexibility, originality and creativity,” American pedagogy invariably emphasizes simultaneous instruction (“frontal teaching”) in teacher-dominated classrooms, competition, individual performance and achievement, “listening, reading textbooks, completing workbooks and worksheets, and taking quizzes,” “seeking right answers, conforming, and reproducing the known.” This paper will argue that the social relations, organization, and psychology of the contemporary classroom system are interdependent and that they entered English and American education with the penetration of the classroom by the market and “disciplinary” revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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History of Education Quarterly , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , Fall 1989 , pp. 381 - 417
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Copyright © 1989 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Gay, Peter, ed., John Locke on Education (New York, 1964), 36.Google Scholar

2 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments ed. Macfie, A. L. and Raphael, D. D. (Indianapolis, 1976), 259.Google Scholar

3 Goodlad, John, A Place Called School (New York, 1984), 241, 105–6, 123–25, 213. See also Sizer, Theodore, Horace's Compromise (New York, 1984), pt. 1, chs. 4, 5 and pt. 11, ch. 1; Powell, Arthur, Farrar, Elizabeth, and Cohen, David, The Shopping Mall High School (Boston, 1985), ch. 1, 2; Gerald Grant, The World We Created at Hamilton High (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), intro., chs. 1, 4; Connell, Robert, et al., Making the Difference (Sydney, 1983); Jackson, Philip, Life in Classrooms (New York, 1968), ch. 1; Henry, Jules, Culture against Man (New York, 1965), 296; Lightfoot, Sarah L., The Good High School (New York, 1983), ch. 3; Parsons, Talcott, “The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society,“ Harvard Educational Review 29 (Fall 1959): 297–318; Dreeben, Robert, On What Is Learned in School (Reading, Mass., 1968); Davis, Kingsly and Moore, Wilbert, “Some Principles of Stratification,” American Sociological Review 10 (Apr. 1945): 242–49.Google Scholar

4 My argument is not that Lancaster's pedagogy was the only point of entry of the market and disciplinary revolutions into educational practice, rather that it was an especially important one. The notion of a disciplinary revolution is derived from Michel Foucault's writings on “disciplinary power,” although “disciplinary revolution” is not a term Foucault himself used. For Foucault's notion of “disciplinary power,” see Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pt. 3; idem, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, R. (New York, 1978); idem, Power/Knowledge, ed. Gordon, C. (New York, 1980); idem, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York, 1986); idem, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self (New York, 1986); idem, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Bouchard, D. (Ithaca, 1977); Rabinow, P., ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

5 For instance, one prominent historian, Kaestle, Carl, concludes that Lancaster is “a central figure in the period 1800–1830, a crucial transition period for education in both England and America.” Above all, “Lancaster popularized the idea of a uniform system of instruction, and in America, the broader concept of organized systems of schools… under central direction.” Indeed, Kaestle claims that the “efficiency ethic in education found its early expression in the monitorial movement” and that “the seeds of school bureaucracy were borne on the wings of Lancaster's instructional scheme.” Finally, Kaestle concludes that Lancaster's “nonsectarian religious and moral training… cleared the way for uniform, tax-supported schools.” Kaestle, Carl F., ed., Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement: A Documentary History (New York, 1973), 46, 47. For similar views, see Jones, M. G., The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (London, 1964), 336; Silver, Harold, The Concept of Popular Education (London, 1965), 43; McCadden, Joseph, Education in Pennsylvania, 1801–1835, and Its Debt to Roberts Vaux (Philadelphia, 1937), 44; and Cubberley, Ellwood P., Public Education in the United States (Boston, 1919), 94. In the past decade or so, a number of historians have mounted two kinds of revisionist challenges to the conventional wisdom about Lancaster—one identifying Lancaster's connection to the triumph of capitalism, the other linking Lancaster to the disciplinary revolution. On the one hand, David Hamilton suggests that the “moral economy” of the Lancasterian classroom is very similar to the moral economy recommended by Adam Smith and that Lancaster's innovations in school organization were to the creation of the classroom system what the emergence of factory production was to the creation of modern manufacturing. On the other hand, Keith Hoskins and Ian Macvie link Lancaster to the disciplinary revolution, although not to the market revolution. Karen Jones and Kevin Williamson link Lancaster to the disciplinary revolution and to nineteenth-century class politics, but not to the market revolution. Hamilton, David, “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System,“ Journal of Curriculum Studies 12 (1980): 281–98; Hoskin, Keith and Macvie, Robert, “Accounting and Examination: A Genealogy of Disciplinary Power,” Accounting, Organizations, and Society 11 (1986): 105–36; and Jones, Karen and Williamson, Kevin, “The Birth of the Schoolroom,” I and C: Governing the Present 6 (Autumn 1979): 58–110.Google Scholar

6 “Bourgeois” here designates not so much a particular social group as a particular structure of social relations—and its ideological representations—characterized by competition, isomorphic contractual commitments, individual achievement, meritocratic mobility, and free markets in land, commodities, and labor. Broadly speaking, bourgeois social relations began to appear piecemeal during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but it was not until the triumph of capitalism during the eighteenth century that they came into their own as a recognizably distinct social formation qualitatively different from the estates world of feudal Europe or the ancien régime.Google Scholar

7 Lancaster, Joseph, Improvements in Education As It Relates to the Industrious Classes of the Community 3d ed. (London, 1805), in Joseph Lancaster, ed. Kaestle, , 62–63. Because I found significant passages missing from Kaestle's expurgated edition (the third edition published in 1805), and because other editions include important passages not included in the 1805 edition, I have also used the original unexpurgated 1805 edition and other editions. When I have used Kaestle's edition, I have noted this in parentheses.Google Scholar

8 Lancaster, , Improvements 3d ed., 27.Google Scholar

9 Lancaster, Joseph, A Letter to John Foster, Esq., Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, on the Best Means of Educating and Employing the Poor, in That Country (London, 1805), 10.Google Scholar

10 “Vital Religion” was an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century apostolic effort to moralize English society that encompasses Methodism, the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Reformation of Manners, evangelicals, Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More, the Clapham sect, Sunday schools, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and humanitarian reformers of every variety. See Halévy, Elie, England in 1815 (London, 1949), pt. 3, ch. 1; Briggs, Asa, The Making of Modern England, 1783–1867 (New York, 1959), 66–74; Laqueur, Thomas, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976), chs. 1, 2, 7; Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), ch. 11.Google Scholar

11 My approach then is more “structural” than causal, less an intellectual history of the market and disciplinary revolutions, than of the intellectual constructions implicit in Joseph Lancaster's pedagogy. Clearly, such an approach is not without its drawbacks. Above all, such a procedure ignores historical process—the manner and mechanisms of influence and change—that would in principle explain the sources and development of Lancaster's ideas and practices. But I have to confess that I am uncertain as to how the eighteenth-century revolution in moral psychology reached and influenced Lancaster. Given Lancaster's limited education, it is highly unlikely that Lancaster was especially aware of these intellectual developments, yet the similarity of his views to this broader intellectual revolution cannot be denied.Google Scholar

12 Thereafter, Lancaster's fortunes fell as his educational influence grew. Impetuous, undisciplined, and self-important, he gradually alienated his financial and moral supporters in England, including the leadership of the British and Foreign School Society founded in 1813 to promote Lancasterian education and to reform British charity schooling. Eventually, in 1818, bankrupt and convinced that he was not adequately appreciated in his own country, he migrated to the United States. His considerable fame as a pedagogical innovator had preceded him by at least a decade, so he had no trouble getting an initial appointment as director of the Philadelphia Model School. But this, too, did not satisfy him. Eventually, after a series of unhappy school appointments elsewhere in the country, he left the United States to reside in Argentina with a rich widow. That arrangement also failed to work out, and he returned again to the United States, penniless as ever. Walking across a New York street in 1838, he was trampled and fatally injured by a run-away horse. For further details, see Joseph Lancaster, Epitome of some of the chief events and transactions in the life of Joseph Lancaster, containing an account of the rise and progress of the Lancasterian system of education and the author's future prospects of usefulness to mankind. Written by himself and published to promote the education of his family… (New Haven, 1833), 5; idem, The Lancasterian System of Education with Improvements (Baltimore, 1821), vii; Salmon, David, Joseph Lancaster (London, 1904), 1–2, 16–18.Google Scholar

13 Lancaster was not the first to employ older students to teach younger ones—the practice dates back at least to Elizabethan times—but he was apparently the first to use the term “monitors.” Dr. Andrew Bell had begun to use older students or “ushers” to help younger students sometime after he began teaching in Madras, India, in the late 1780s. In 1797 Bell explained the principles of his system in An Experiment in Education. Bell later insisted that Lancaster stole the idea of employing student monitors from him, although David Salmon dismisses this claim and suggests that Lancaster borrowed the idea of monitorial instruction from a dissenting charity school that he attended in his neighborhood. Salmon, , Joseph Lancaster, 2, 7. On the Bell—Lancaster controversy generally, see Fox, Joseph, A Comparative View of the Plans of Education as Detailed in the Publications of Dr. Bell and Mr. Lancaster (London, 1808); Salmon, Joseph Lancaster, chs. 5, 6. See also Hamilton, , “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System,“ 285–86.Google Scholar

14 Lancaster, , Epitome 6; idem, A Short Account of the Rise and Progress of the Lancasterian System (1821), reprinted in Joseph Lancaster, ed. Kaestle, , 55–61; Salmon, David, ed. The Practical Parts of Lancaster's Improvements and Bell's Experiment (Cambridge, 1932), vii–ix.Google Scholar

15 Lancaster, Joseph, Improvements in Education Abridged, Containing a Complete Epitome of the System of Education invented and practised by the Author (London, 1808), 1–2, 58.Google Scholar

16 Lancaster, , Improvements (Kaestle), 66, 67, 64, 70, 74–75, 76–77. See also Salmon, , Joseph Lancaster, eh. 3; “Monitorial System,” the American Journal of Education 101 (June 1861): 461–66; “Joseph Lancaster,” ibid., 355–62.Google Scholar

17 Ariès, Philippe reports that during the course of the fifteenth century, French grammar school masters began to divide their large numbers of “heterogeneous” students into distinct groups within the same room, “according to the extent of the pupil's knowledge,” and to instruct each group or “lectio” separately. By the early sixteenth century educational writers had begun to use the word “class” instead of “lectio.” Erasmus (borrowing from Quintilian) used it in 1519, Baduel in 1538, and Sturm in 1539. In England, at St. Paul's in London, John Colet divided students into classes in the early sixteenth century. By the late sixteenth century, French Jesuits had created a sequence of studies and separated students into classes, although they remained committed to individual instruction and recitation. Later, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jean Baptiste de la Salle divided French Christian Brothers’ charity schools into “classes” of “anything up to a hundred boys.” Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood (Hammondsworth, 1973), 173, 175–77, chs. 11, 12; Durkheim, Emile, The Evolution of Educational Thought (London, 1977), chs. 20, 21; Battersby, W. J., De La Salle: A Pioneer of Modern Education (London, 1949), 79. Given that Lancaster attended a dissenting charity school in his youth and that a Jesuit charity school was also located close by, it is possible that Lancaster adopted their classing and instructional practices. See Armytage, W. H., 400 Years of English Education (Cambridge, 1964), 41.Google Scholar

18 The Lancasterian Manual used in the public schools of Philadelphia in the late 1820s underscores the new conception of the classroom. The Manual states that “in the first organization of a school, there must be a division into classes, those pupils being placed together whose abilities or proficiency are nearly equal, either in reading or arithmetic.” Its author, Rhees, J. L., then commented that “the consequence of this arrangement is, that the pupils of a class of reading or arithmetic are on a level; they have the same degree of knowledge to acquire, and the same duties to fulfil, in order to qualify them for a superior class.” Rhees, J. L., A Pocket Manual of the Lancasterian System of Education in its Most Improved State, as practised in the Model School, First School District of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1827), 11.Google Scholar

19 See, for example, Appleby, Joyce, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1978); MacPherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962); Cropsey, Joseph, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (Westport, Conn., 1977).Google Scholar

20 Ironically, as David Hamilton points out, the theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment adopted the Renaissance notion of school “class” as a cohort of students at different levels on the same course of study and put it to a very different use—as a model for the social structure of a commercial society, replacing the static idea of ranks and stations of the ancien régime. Like the Renaissance language of school “class,” the Scottish language of “class” was a language of mobility, not of fixed status. See Hamilton, , “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System,“ 285–88.Google Scholar

21 Still the best introduction to the market revolution is Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957).Google Scholar

22 For especially useful reviews of Foucault's work, see Sheridan, Alan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London, 1980); Dews, P., “Power and Subjectivity in Foucault,“ New Left Review 144 (Mar./Apr. 1984): 72–95; Bernauer, James and Rasmussen, David, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Smart, B., Foucault, Marxism and Critique (London, 1983); Megill, Allan, Prophets of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, 1985), pt. 3; Lemert, Charles and Gillan, Garta, Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression (New York, 1982); Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982); Mercquior, J. G., Foucault (Berkeley, 1985); Major-Poetzl, Pamela, Michel Foucault's Archeology of Western Culture: Toward a New Science of History (Chapel Hill, 1983); Cohen, Stanley and Scull, Andrew, eds., Social Control and the State (New York, 1983), 75–105, 141–88; Fraser, N., “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1 (Oct. 1981): 272–88; Hoy, David C., ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (New York, 1986); O'Neill, J., “The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault,” British Journal of Sociology 27 (Mar. 1986): 42–60.Google Scholar

23 Or, as Foucault himself puts it, his analysis of power aims to “cut off the king's head.” Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Gordon, , 121. Foucault's strategy here then is very different from the strategy of more structuralist theorists of the state (Althusser, Louis and Poulantzas, Nicos, for example) who attempt, so to speak, to inflate the size of the “king's head” by making the state synonymous with all power relationships.Google Scholar

24 Foucault, , The History of Sexuality 1: 92–93; idem, Discipline and Punish, 215–16, 136–38, 170, 30, 222. Through his notion of “genealogy,” Foucault distinguishes his own intellectual method from that of traditional historians preoccupied with the search for “origins” and various “indefinite teleologies” the idea of progress, dialetical meterialism, etc. For Foucault, the practice of “history” is mired in a quest for power; genealogy seeks to expose the relations among power, knowledge, and the body in modern societies. For useful discussions, see Sheridan, Michel Foucault, 113–34; and Dreyfus, and Rabinow, , Michel Foucault, ch. 5.Google Scholar

25 Foucault, , “Truth and Power,“ The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York, 1984), 61; idem, Discipline and Punish, 201, see also 172. Foucault argues that the military camp was the first general model of hierarchical surveillance, but that it was soon followed by hospitals, schools, and workshops. Bentham's Panopticon (“all seeing”) was simply the culmination of a long history and exemplified, rather than invented, the basic principles of “hierarchical surveillance” in its purest architectural form.Google Scholar

26 Foucault, , Discipline and Punish 170, 176, 177–78, 180, 183, 184–94. For a useful brief analysis of Foucault's theory of “discipline and social regulation,” see Smart, Foucault, Marxism, and Critique, ch. 5.Google Scholar

27 Foucault, , “Two Lectures,“ in Power/Knowledge. ed. Gordon, , 102. It is important to be clear about what exactly Foucault is and is not saying here. He is not saying that we should not study Leviathan—that is, state power. He is merely saying that we should not conceive all power on the model of state power.Google Scholar

28 See, for example, Foucault's “Politics and Reason,” in Michel Foucault, ed. Kritzman, , ch. 4; and “The Subject and Power” in Dreyfus, and Rabinow, , Michel Foucault, 208–26.Google Scholar

29 First, Foucault argues for an interdependent and reflexive relationship between the industrial and disciplinary revolutions: “Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other.” One revolution did not parent the other; the two revolutions grew up together, feeding and nurturing each other, linked together by a “whole intermediary cluster of relations,” and united by a common interest in promoting a “parallel increase in usefulness and docility.” But second, because the techniques of disciplinary power first appeared independently in monasteries, education, the military, and medicine a century or more before the rise of industrial capitalism, Foucault also suggests that the disciplinary revolution is the older and stronger brother. While the disciplinary revolution did not cause the indistrial revolution, it provided an essential precondition for its success: the triumph of industrial capitalism depended upon the earlier deployment of disciplinary power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its extension and consolidation afterward. Technologies of disciplinary power made possible the disciplining of bodies and populations and the accumulation of capital; it became possible to make men, women, and children work efficiently and productively only after they had been disciplined and “caught up in a system of subjection.” The body “becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.” And finally, Foucault employs a third argument—namely, that capitalism determined the “modalities” of disciplinary power. “The growth of a capitalist economy,” he writes, “gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy,’ could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions.” Foucault, , Discipline and Punish 136–38, 218, 221.Google Scholar

30 For a more elaborate argument along these lines, see Spitzer, S., “The Rationalization of Crime Control in Capitalist Society,“ in Social Control and the State, eds. Cohen, and Scull, , ch. 13.Google Scholar

31 Lea, John, “Discipline and Capitalist Development,“ in Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy Theory to Marxism, eds. Fine, Barry et al., 1979), 79, 81; Marx, Karl, Capital (Harmondsworth, 1976), 1:899.Google Scholar

32 Haskell went on to conclude: “The market altered character by heaping tangible rewards on people who displayed a certain calculating, moderately assertive style of conduct, while humbling others whose manner was more unbuttoned or who pitched their affairs at a level of aggressiveness either higher or lower than the prevailing standard.” Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts 1,2,” American Historical Review 90 (Apr./June 1985): 342, 547, 550.Google Scholar

33 In his “Two Lectures,” for example, Foucault urges that an analysis of power “should not concern itself with power at the level of conscious intention or decision; that it should not attempt to consider power from its internal point of view and that it should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question: ‘Who has power and what has he in mind? What is the aim of someone who possesses power?’ Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices. What is needed is a study of power in its external visage.” Foucault, “Two Lectures,” and “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Gordon, , 97–98, 102, 118.Google Scholar

34 Foucault, , Discipline and Punish 26—27; idem, “The Subject and Power” in Dreyfus, and Rabinow, , Michel Foucault, 216–7.Google Scholar

35 For one such criticism, see Taylor, Charles, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,“ in Foucault, ed. Hoy, 83–90. For an effective defense of Foucault on this point, see Hoy, D. C., “Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School,” in ibid., 124–35.Google Scholar

36 Taylor, , “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,“ 87–88. Emphasis in the original. See also Haskell, , “Capitalism and the Humanitarian Sensibility,“ 346–47, especially footnote #22.Google Scholar

37 See, for example, Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York, 1978), ch. 3; and idem, “State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions,” in Social Control and the State, eds. Cohen, and Scull, , 87–88. See also Ingleby, David, “Mental Health and Social Order,“ in ibid., 178–79.Google Scholar

38 As Foucault once put it, power is not an “institution,” or a “structure,” but a localized practice that arises in “action” found “everywhere.” “Power,” he asserts, “is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and… it exists only in action.” He then goes on to substitute Clausewitz's aphorism that war is politics continued by other means with the claim that “power is war, war continued by other means.” (Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 89–91). Of course, this also suggests another problem. If “power” is nominalistically defined and if it is “everywhere,” then Foucault must intend it to explain everything. But if it explains everything, how can it explain anything in particular? Or, as Dreyfus and Rabinow note, “If power is nominalized, how is it explanatory?” Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 207.Google Scholar

39 This argument was in part suggested to me by Taylor, , “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,“ 85–88.Google Scholar

40 Ignatieff, Michael, on the other hand, suggests, incorrectly in my view, that family relations, “gift relationships,” and relations based on “sympathy” do not exhibit the characteristics of disciplinary power. As Foucault suggested in an interview in 1983, “power relations… are multiple; they have different forms, they can be in play in family relations, or within an institution, or an administration.” Ignatieff, “State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions,” 98–99; and Foucault, , “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,“ in Michel Foucault, ed. Kritzman, , 38.Google Scholar

41 My formulation of the notions of “disciplinary” and “repressive” pedagogy grew out of my original reading of Foucault. Since then I have read Bruce Curtis's work on Ontario in which he employs similar notions that I have found provacative and useful. See Curtis, Bruce, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London, Ont., 1988). See also Corrigan, Philip, “On Moral Regulation: Some Preliminary Remarks,“ Sociological Review 29 (1981): 313–37; and Corrigan, Philip and Sayer, Derek, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

42 Lancaster, , Letter to John Foster 10; idem, Improvements in Education, 3d ed., 37; idem, Improvements in Education (Kaestle), 66, 64.Google Scholar

43 Lancaster, , Letter to John Foster 29, 17–18.Google Scholar

44 For Calvinist conceptions of the passions, see Calvin, John, The Institutes of the Christian Religion trans. Allen, J. (1559; Philadelphia, 1928), vol. 1: bk. 11, ch. 1–6; bk. 111, ch. 1–15. For the eighteenth-century revolution in moral psychology, see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1977), pt. 1; Crocker, Lester G., An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore, 1959), esp. ch. 7–11; Lovejoy, Arthur O., Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore, 1961), esp. chs. 2, 4–7; idem, Essays on the History of Ideas (New York, 1948), ch. 4; Kaye, F. B., ed., The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, by Bernard Mandeville (Oxford, 1924), 1: xvii–cxlvi; Meyers, Marvin L., The Soul of Modern Economic Man: Ideas of Self-interest from Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith (Chicago, 1983); Fiering, Norman, Jonathan Edward's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, 1981), ch. 4; Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), ch. 5.Google Scholar

45 Quoted by Salmon, , Joseph Lancaster 9. Elsewhere Lancaster wrote in the same vein that “education is too much confined to mere knowledge, mere precept. If the lessons are performed, it is deemed sufficient; and there is but little idea entertained of watching continuously over the conduct of youth, lest they should form connections, or engage in pursuits, inimical to their happiness and virtue.” Lancaster, Letter to John Foster, 5.Google Scholar

46 On the new “moral economy,” see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97; and Pollard, Sydney, “Factory Discipline and the Industrial Revolution,“ Economic History Review 14 (1963): 254–71. For one attempt to link Lancaster to the new moral economy, see Hamilton, “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System”; and for one attempt to link Foucault to the new moral economy, see O'Neill, , “The Disciplinary Society.”Google Scholar

47 Lancaster, , Letter to John Foster 10; idem, Improvements in Education, 3d ed., 37; idem, Improvements (Kaestle), 66, 64.Google Scholar

48 I have borrowed the notion of a “grammar of motive” from Jean-Christophe Agnew, who in turn borrowed it from Burke, Peter. Agnew argues that the early market revolution created a crisis in the “representation” of individual subjectivity. In an era when the simplified cash nexus of commerce had begun to replace the human nexus of social relations, Englishmen had great difficulty in knowing how to represent “the nature of social identity, intentionality, accountability, transparency, and reciprocity in commodity transactions.” Grammars of motive filled the void left by the collapse of traditional social identities and “representations” by providing “ideological solutions to cultural confusions produced by the spread of market exchange.” Grammars of motive, however, were more than just intellectual representations, as Agnew suggests. When deployed in institutions, they became the foundation of what Foucault calls “discursive practices” in effect, a disciplinary grammar of motive intended to shape individual subjectivity as much as represent it. Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986), 5, 6–7, 9, 60–61, 68, 79–80, 82–83, 90–93. See also MacPherson, , The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism; idem, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, 1973), ch. 1–3; Hirschman, , The Passions and the Interests; and Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York, 1985), ch. 2.Google Scholar

49 Lancaster, , Improvements (Kaestle), 77.Google Scholar

50 Smith, , The Theory of Moral Sentiments 10, 13, 9–11, 116, 114. In discussing the origins of ambition, for example, Smith asks, “From whence… arises that emulation which runs all through the different ranks of man, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition?” Smith's answer is that they were the products of our desire “to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation.” “Fellow-feeling” and the desire for approbation, rather than greed or rapacity, motivates individuals to emulate the successful and to improve themselves. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 50, 52. For a similar analysis that provoked my own and to which I am much indebted, see Hamilton, “The Moral Economy of the Classroom System,” 289.Google Scholar

51 Lancaster, , Letter to John Foster 19. See also idem, “The Psychology of Monitorial Instruction,” in Kaestle, , ed., Joseph Lancaster 97, 99.Google Scholar

52 Adam Smith made a similar assumption. As we have seen, Smith considered the human sentiments sociable by nature; consequently, he did not anticipate that the pursuit of individual interest would tear apart the social fabric. In addition, he assumed that most individuals in society internalized a “sense of duty” through learning a “sacred regard to general rules” derived from religion. Together, sociability and the internalization of moral rules protected moral order. The “moral faculties” direct “our conduct in this life… [as] the supreme arbitrars [sic] of all our actions, to superintend all our senses, passions, and appetites, and to judge how each of them was to be indulged or restrained.” In other words, Smith assumed, without ever proving, that the prior moralization of individuals would preserve moral order and community in a society of “self-interested” actors even as the “invisible hand” of market competition promoted the general welfare. Or, to put the matter in terms of disciplinary power, Smith assumed the viability of a market society because he presupposed the prior normalization of subjectivity. Smith, , The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 162, 163, 165.Google Scholar

53 Lancaster's notion of emulation is of the kind that A. O. Lovejoy designates by the term “emulative approbation.” “Emulative approbation” was a combination of two passions; “approbativeness” or “that peculiarity of man which consists in a susceptibility to pleasure in, or a desire for, the thought of oneself as an object of thoughts or feelings, of certain kinds, on the part of other people,” and “emulativeness,” or the desire for superiority, or the feeling of superiority, over others. Combined, they formed “emulative approbation”—a desire or craving for superiority over, and the esteem of, others. Where approbation was a noncompetitive concept, “emulative approbation” transformed social interactions into a zero-sum calculus of winners and losers. See Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 88, 112, 115–16, 134, 129. See also Crocker, , An Age of Crisis, ch. 11. Lancaster was not, of course, the first pedagogue to think of emulation in this way. In 1512 Erasmus suggested that group teaching, unlike individual tutoring, could arouse a “state of mutual rivalry” among students. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French Jesuits took Erasmus one step further by linking the love of fame with intense competition and emulation.Google Scholar

54 Lancaster, , Improvements (Kaestle), 74; idem, Improvements in Education, 3d ed., 30–31; idem, Improvements in Education, 2d ed., 23; idem, Letter to John Foster, 19. Indeed, in a review of Bentham's attempt to adapt Lancaster's pedagogy to the needs of middle-class children published in the first issue of the Westminster Review, Sydney Smith linked Lancaster's stress on emulation with the cultivation of “sympathy.” “The stimulus of emulation,” he wrote, “produces no anger, no malignant feelings.” Instead, “children are better taught… because of the sympathy they take in each other.” [S. Smith], “The Psychology of Monitorial Instruction,” Joseph Lancaster, ed. Kaestle, , 99, 97.Google Scholar

55 Lancaster, , Letter to John Foster 28; idem, Improvements in Education Abridged (1808), 63, 65.Google Scholar

56 Lancaster, , Improvements in Education 2d ed., 17, 12, 74, 76, 64, 65, 70, 75, 78–79.Google Scholar

57 Lancaster, , Improvements in Education 3d ed., 83–84.Google Scholar

58 See, for example, Malthus, Thomas, On Population ed. Himmelfarb, G. (New York, 1960), bk. 3. Hamilton makes a similar point. Hamilton, , “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System,“ 289. See also Kenneth Dennis, “Competition” in the History of Economic Thought (New York, 1977), ch. 3, 4.Google Scholar

59 Rousseau, Jean J., “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,“ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ed. Crocker, L. G. (New York, 1967); idem, Emile; or On Education, ed. Allan Bloom (New York, 1979). The first important modern statement of this nexus can be found in Thomas Hobbes's discussion of human “motion” in chapter six of the Leviathan. Later, as MacPherson reminds us, Locke and then the utilitarians assumed that man had an unlimited desire to defend the right of unlimited appropriation of property. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecctesiasticall and Civil, ed. Oakshott, M. (London, 1962); MacPherson, Possessive Individualism, chs. 2, 4; and idem, Democratic Theory, ch. 1. See also Frederich Nietzsche, , On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Kaufman, W. (New York, 1969); and Lovejoy, , Human Nature, ch. 3.Google Scholar

60 For a penetrating analysis of the role of “uneasiness” and desire in Lockean psychology, see Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston, 1960), 327–31.Google Scholar

61 Lancaster, , Improvements in Education 2d ed., 9–10.Google Scholar

62 Gay, , ed., John Locke on Education 92–93. William Godwin came to the same conclusion shortly before Lancaster did. After arguing that motivation is the wellspring of successful pedagogy, Godwin goes on: “The most desirable mode of education is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire.” Godwin, William, The Enquirer, Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature (London, 1797) 3, 78. Cited in Silver, The Concept of Popular Education, 89.Google Scholar

63 Locke, , too, had recognized a link between emulation and classing. But because he feared the corrupting effects that the example of others might have on the virtue of the gentlemen's son, Locke recommended private tutoring rather than schooling. Lancaster, however, was interested in the education of the poor. Unlike Mandeville who had believed that “knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires” and therefore should be denied the poor, Lancaster believed that the increase of desire provided a solid psychological foundation on which to base the education of the poor, not a reason to keep the poor in ignorance. And he did so because he did not believe, as Mandeville had insisted, that the source of emulation is envy. Even less did he agree with Rousseau who argued that emulation and approbation increased our desires and who therefore condemned it as a source of psychological dependency and moral corruption. See Rousseau, Jean J., Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality in The First and Second Discourse: Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. Masters, Roger D. (New York, 1964); and idem, Emile. Google Scholar

64 Lemert, After and Gillan, , Michel Foucault 76.Google Scholar

65 Oakes, Jeannie, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, 1985), 209.Google Scholar

66 Lancaster, , Improvements (Kaestle), 67, 76, 77–78. Elsewhere he wrote that “the object in view, in forming a School into classes, is to promote improvement. If only four or six scholars should on examination be found in a school learning the same thing, they should be formed into a class as their proficiency will be nearly doubled, by being classed, and studying in conjunction.” Lancaster, , Improvements in Education Abridged, 1.”Google Scholar

67 Bell, , An Experiment in Education… (1805), 62, quoted in Salmon, Lancaster's Experiments, xivi.Google Scholar

68 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 9 (1807) col. 798.Google Scholar

69 Southey, Robert, “A Comparative View of the Plans of Education…,“ Quarterly Review 6 (Oct. 1811): 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 303.Google Scholar

70 Quoted in Silver, , The Concept of Popular Education 47.Google Scholar

71 Trimmer, Sarah, A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education Promulgated by Mr. Joseph Lancaster in his tracts concerning the instruction of the children of the labouring part of the community… (London, 1805), 39, reprinted in part in Joseph Lancaster, ed. Kaestle, , 105–106. See also Trimmer, Sarah, The Oeconomy of Charity (London, 1787), 3, 27–28, in which Trimmer defends “the various orders of people as the creations of “our wise and beneficent CREATOR” and the lack of discipline among servants.” Salmon, Joseph Lancaster, 25–32, discusses the clash between Lancaster and Trimmer at some length.Google Scholar

72 Lancaster, , Improvements 3d ed., 126.Google Scholar

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74 Lancaster, , Letter to John Foster 10.Google Scholar

75 Ibid., 5–6, 18.Google Scholar

76 This is not to say that relying on habit was a new emphasis in moral philosophy. For centuries philosophers, as Norman Fiering notes, had defined habits as “an acquired power of the soul that gave a person a facility and consistency in some activity,” whereas the modern meaning stresses “merely autonomic behavior.” Moral philosophers until modern times thus understood the habit of virtue as a “conscious, intelligent, internal disposition that underlies and gives rise to virtuous acts.” For short but useful histories of the place of habits in moral philosophy, see the entry under “Habit” in the Oxford English Dictionary(Oxford, 1933), 5: 4–6; Fiering, Norman, “Benjamin Franklin and the Way to Virtue,“ American Quarterly 30 (Summer 1978): esp. 202–13; and Passmore, John, “The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Wasserman, Earl (Baltimore, 1965), 27–46.Google Scholar

77 The image was suggested by Lancaster's rival, Bell, Andrew, who described his own monitorial system as “the steam engine of the moral world,” an “intellectual engine” that “has the seat of its power and operation in the human breast, is everywhere in action, and, by an infallible and irresistible impulse, in giving motion to the moral and intellectual world.” Bell, Andrew, Manual of Public and Private Education Founded on Discovery (London, 1827), 15–16, quoted in Eugene and Asterie Provenzo, “Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster: An Examination of the Emergence of the Theme of Knowledge and Power” (Paper presented at the History of Education Conference, Toronto, Nov. 1988.) For an excellent “disciplinary” account of habituation in Ontario during the mid-nineteenth century, see Curtis, Building the Educational State, 14, 142, 367–78.Google Scholar

78 Indeed, Foucault relies upon monitoral instruction and Lancaster's school to highlight key features of the disciplinary society. See Discipline and Punish, 175–76.Google Scholar

79 Gay, , ed., John Locke on Education 29–31, 32, 38–39.Google Scholar

80 Lancaster, , Improvements in Education Abridged appendix.Google Scholar

81 Lancaster, , The Lancasterian System of Education 89.Google Scholar

82 Ibid., 91.Google Scholar

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84 See Figure 1–3 in Lancaster, Improvements (Kaestle), opp. 74.Google Scholar

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88 Smith, , “Comparative View,“ 111. Another reviewer in the Philanthropist was also struck by the “military order” of the school and the way it was “interwoven into the school discipline, but without the least severity.” “On the Importance of Promoting the General Education of the Poor,” Philanthropist (1811): 83. Foucault, , of course, makes much of the military origins of the techniques of disciplinary power.Google Scholar

89 Foucault, , Discipline and Punish 180–84.Google Scholar

90 It is important to note, as Hoskin and Macvie point out, that Lancaster's system of “inspections” and evaluation was ordinal rather than interval-level: while it ranked students in a hierarchy, it did not measure or signal the value of the differences or “gaps” between students. Later, during the nineteenth century, other reformers would develop far more precise interval-level measures of academic and moral performance. Nor was Lancaster's system “grammatocentric” in that Lancaster did not keep written case histories of each student that became the basis of the student's record. For these reasons, Lancaster did not employ a fully “modern” system of human accountability as in an examination system based on interval-level units of measurement and written case histories. See Hoskin and Macvie, “Accounting and Examination,” 126.Google Scholar

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92 From the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, three issues particularly agitated criminal law and penal reformers: the heavy reliance of the criminal law on capital punishment to deter crime, the wide discretionary power of judges to set aside capital punishment if they so wished, and the state of the prisons. Lancaster's disciplinary system was remarkably similar in its principal components and psychology to the ideas of the leading criminal law and penal reformers of his day. Undoubtedly that similarity partly explains why they were, for the most part, such fervent supporters of Lancaster, or at least Lancasterian education. For the history of penal reform, see Randell McGowen, “The Image of Justice and Reform of the Criminal Law in Early Nineteenth Century England,” Buffalo Law Review (1985); idem, “A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 25 (July 1986): 315–19; Hay, Douglas, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,“ in Hay, D., et al., Albion's Fatal Tree (New York, 1975); Foucault, , Discipline and Punish, chs. 1, 2; Ignatieff, , A Just Measure of Pain, ch. 2.Google Scholar

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95 Ibid., 36. Durkheim describes a similar combination in the Jesuit disciplinary system. Durkheim, Evolution of Educational Thought, 263–64.Google Scholar

96 Bentham for one also recognized this after reading Lancaster's Improvements. Lancaster's innovations inspired Bentham to write his Chrestomathia (1816), a work that sums up the reformist spirit of hierarchial observation and normalizing judgement as his Pan-optican. See Jeremy Bentham, “Chrestomathia,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, J. (Edinburgh, 1843), 8: 1–192.Google Scholar

97 On Lancasterian schools as “factories” or as means for socializing students into the habits of “industrial discipline,” see Kaestle, , ed., Joseph Lancaster 11; Thompson, , The Making of the English Working Class, 415.Google Scholar

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99 Harold Perkin makes a similar but not identical argument in discussing the making of a “class” society in England. Perkin argues that religion was the “midwife of class,” but he conceives class in conventional terms as a social grouping, rather than as a particular structure of social relations, institutional arrangements, and broad social processes of class formation. See Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (Toronto, 1969), 196. For a view of religion as the midwife of “class” much closer to the one I have suggested here, see Johnson, Paul, A Shopkeeper's Millennium (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

100 On state formation as a process of cultural revolution, see Corrigan, and Sayer, , The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution.Google Scholar

101 Tawney, R. H., “Forward“ to Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism trans. Parsons, T. (1904; New York, 1958), 4–5, 7–8, 10.Google Scholar

102 MacPherson, , Possessive Individualism idem, “Market Concepts in Political Theory,” in Democratic Theory (Oxford, 1973), ch. 10. The fact that Locke wrote from a religious rather than a secular perspective as MacPherson assumed, only heightens the similarity between Locke and Lancaster.Google Scholar