This series covers the philosophical foundations of our education system, monitorial schools, the simultaneous method, Horace Mann's Prussian honeymoon, and the three fatal mistakes that still haunt American education today.

The one-room schoolhouse wasn’t the beginning of American education.

Before rural communities built schoolhouses and hired teachers, education happened in kitchens and parlors, taught by widows and housewives who charged a few shillings per child. These were dame schools, and they worked remarkably well for centuries before reformers decided they were embarrassingly primitive.

Now, after spending a century destroying small schools in favor of industrial-scale institutions, we’re witnessing their resurrection. They’re called microschools, and they look suspiciously like what we abandoned. The irony is almost too perfect: we’ve come full circle, but we had to call it innovation to make it acceptable.

The Original Microschool

Dame schools emerged naturally in Britain and Colonial America from the 16th through 19th centuries. They weren’t the product of educational theory or government policy. They arose because communities needed them and women could provide them.

The model was beautifully simple. A local woman, often a widow or unmarried woman needing income, would take children into her home for a few hours each day. For a small fee, she taught reading, writing, basic arithmetic, and religious instruction. Girls learned sewing and other domestic skills. The teacher used whatever materials were available: a hornbook, a primer, perhaps a Bible and Psalter.

Class sizes ranged from a handful to perhaps fifteen children, typically ages two to five in Britain, sometimes older in America. The children came from working-class families. In many cases this was the only formal schooling they would ever receive.

The dame school operated in the teacher’s own home, using her kitchen or parlor as classroom space. There was no bureaucracy, no licensing requirement in most cases, no standardized curriculum. The school dame charged what families could afford and taught what they needed to know.

Critics then and now have ridiculed dame schools as inadequate. Charles Dickens depicted one in Great Expectations as “nearly entirely useless,” taught by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt who dozed through her own classes.

Yet William Wordsworth, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, and Oliver Goldsmith all attended dame schools. Wordsworth later reflected that his dame school “taught to read, and she practiced the memory” and “the faculty was improved.” As late as 1850, around 30 percent of all British children attended dame schools rather than the “superior” alternatives available to them.

Parents understood something reformers didn’t: relationship matters more than credentials, and personalized instruction beats standardization.

Why Dame Schools Worked

Dame schools succeeded for the same reasons one-room schools would later succeed and for the same reasons modern microschools are succeeding now.

Small scale enabled individual attention. With fewer than fifteen students, the dame knew each child personally. She understood their strengths, struggles, and family circumstances. She could adapt instruction to individual needs rather than teaching to an imaginary average student.

Mixed ages created natural mentoring. Older children helped younger ones, reinforcing their own learning while developing patience and leadership. The family-like atmosphere felt familiar to working-class children and reduced the intimidation of formal schooling.

Community investment ensured quality. Parents knew the dame personally and could directly observe their children’s progress. If she wasn’t effective, they simply stopped sending their children. Market accountability worked better than bureaucratic oversight.

Low overhead kept costs affordable. Without buildings to construct or administrators to pay, dame schools remained accessible to working families. The dame’s economic incentive aligned with parents’ educational goals. She succeeded when her students learned.

Practical focus matched community needs. Dame schools taught what families valued: reading for religious instruction, basic arithmetic for household accounts, and vocational skills for future work. The curriculum emerged from community priorities rather than distant experts’ theories.

Teacher autonomy allowed responsiveness. The dame could adjust her methods, materials, and schedule to her students’ needs. She wasn’t constrained by standardized curricula, testing requirements, or administrative mandates.

These weren’t weaknesses masquerading as strengths. They were fundamental educational principles that have worked across centuries and cultures. Yet reformers convinced themselves that bigger, more bureaucratic, and more standardized must be better.

The Reformers’ Assault

By the mid-19th century, education reformers had dame schools in their sights. The criticisms followed a predictable pattern, the same pattern we’ve seen repeated with every effort to destroy effective small schools.

The 1861 Newcastle Commission surveyed British schools and painted a “woeful portrait” of dame schools, claiming they “failed to provide children with an education that would be serviceable to them later in life.” Never mind that a third of all children were still attending them by choice over free philanthropic alternatives.

Reformers depicted dame schools as primitive relics that modern society had outgrown. They emphasized the worst examples while ignoring the successful ones. They measured quality by inputs (teacher credentials, facility standards, curriculum scope) rather than outcomes.

The real problem wasn’t educational. It was class and control.

Some historians argue that dame schools threatened social order precisely because they worked too well. They were “run by the working classes for themselves” while other educational options were “guided by middle class officials through the state, charity or the church who wanted to ensure that education did not challenge the strict social structure of Victorian society.”

Dame schools were informal, operated in homes their pupils knew, and gave parents direct control over their children’s education. They resisted standardization and bureaucratic oversight. They couldn’t be easily managed by distant authorities or used to impose cultural uniformity.

So they had to go.

The Elementary Education Act of 1870 created the framework for compulsory schooling of all children ages 5-12 in England and Wales. Subsequently, most dame schools closed. Not because they failed students, but because the government created “better” alternatives and made them mandatory.

America followed a similar path. Colonial dame schools gradually gave way to common schools, then to consolidated districts, then to the factory-model institutions we have today. Each transition was sold as progress, modernization, and educational improvement.

Each step took us further from what actually worked.

From Dame School to One-Room School

The one-room schoolhouse represented a middle stage between dame schools and modern consolidated schools. It preserved some of dame schools’ strengths while introducing elements that would eventually lead to their destruction.

Like dame schools, one-room schools operated at human scale. They served local communities with mixed-age groups of typically fewer than thirty students. One teacher knew each child personally and adapted instruction to individual needs. Parents remained closely involved and communities invested deeply in their local schools.

But unlike dame schools, one-room schools moved education out of homes and into dedicated buildings. They professionalized teaching, requiring formal qualifications rather than accepting whoever could do the work. They introduced more standardized curricula and age-grading. They shifted funding from direct parent payment to community taxation.

These changes seemed minor at first—just reasonable improvements to make education more effective and accessible. But they established the infrastructure and mindset that enabled consolidation.

Once we accepted that education required special buildings, we could argue that bigger buildings were more efficient. Once we required teacher credentials, we could claim that specialists were better than generalists. Once we centralized funding, we could justify centralized control. Once we standardized curricula, we could measure schools against each other and declare some inadequate.

Unfortunately, the one-room school was the thin edge of the wedge that would eventually take away educational localism entirely.

Yet for decades, one-room schools maintained the essential features that made dame schools effective. The 1924 Texas study demonstrated that these schools outperformed larger consolidated alternatives despite having fewer resources and less specialized teachers. They succeeded for the same reasons dame schools succeeded: human relationships and individual attention matter more than credentials and infrastructure.

Then we destroyed them anyway, just as we had destroyed dame schools.

The Microschool Renaissance

Now they’re coming back. We’re calling them microschools, learning pods, or nano-schools, but they’re essentially dame schools with Wi-Fi.

Microschools have been described as “the reinvention of the one-room schoolhouse,” though they’re really reinventing something even older. They typically serve fifteen or fewer students in mixed-age groups with personalized, student-centered learning.

The number of private schools with fewer than five students more than doubled from 2018-19 to 2023-24, growing to nearly 30,000. Many operate in homes, churches, or small rented spaces, just like dame schools. Teachers act as guides rather than lecturers, adapting to students’ needs rather than marching through standardized curricula.

The movement exploded during COVID when parents discovered that their children learned better in small groups than in virtual classrooms managed by overwhelmed teachers. Families formed learning pods, hired tutors, and created informal schools in their homes. When schools reopened, many families chose not to return.

What they created looked remarkably like dame schools and worked for the same reasons.

Scale enables relationship. With fewer than fifteen students, teachers know each child deeply. They can adapt daily to individual needs, interests, and struggles. Parents can observe directly and provide immediate feedback.

Mixed ages promote mentoring. Younger students learn from older ones while older students reinforce their knowledge by teaching. The family-like environment reduces social pressure and bullying.

Community investment ensures quality. Parents choose microschools deliberately and can leave immediately if dissatisfied. Market accountability functions far better than bureaucratic oversight.

Low overhead maintains affordability. Without massive facilities and administrative bureaucracies, microschools can charge less while paying teachers more. Resources flow to instruction rather than infrastructure.

Practical focus serves families. Microschools can emphasize what families value rather than what distant policymakers mandate. Some focus on classical education, others on project-based learning, still others on religious instruction. Diversity emerges from consumer choice rather than bureaucratic planning.

Teacher autonomy enables responsiveness. Microschool leaders can hire teachers based on competence rather than credentials, try new methods without permission, and adjust quickly to what works. Innovation flourishes without bureaucratic constraints.

These are precisely the features that made dame schools and one-room schools effective. We’re rediscovering ancient wisdom while pretending we invented something new.

The Predictable Backlash

Just as reformers attacked dame schools and one-room schools, they’re now attacking microschools with identical arguments.

Critics claim microschools lack accountability. They worry about unqualified teachers and inadequate facilities. They question whether small schools can offer sufficient curriculum breadth. They fear that parental choice will lead to inequality and segregation.

The arguments haven’t changed in two centuries because they were never really about education. They’re about control.

A 2024 analysis found that many microschools operate “outside traditional education principles.” Critics demand that microschools submit to the same regulations that strangled dame schools and one-room schools: teacher licensing requirements, facility standards, curriculum mandates, standardized testing.

Some critics are more honest about their concerns. They worry that microschools allow families to “opt out” of the common culture that public schools supposedly create. They fear that educational diversity will undermine social cohesion and shared values. They argue that the state must ensure all children receive appropriate indoctrination, AKA “democratic citizenship” and “social-emotional learning.”

The subtext is clear: education is too important to be left to parents and communities. Experts know better. Centralized control produces better outcomes than local autonomy. Standardization beats diversity.

These claims contradict all available evidence, but evidence has never been the point.

What History Teaches

We’ve run this experiment three times now. We destroyed dame schools in favor of common schools. We destroyed one-room schools in favor of consolidated districts. Each time, reformers promised that bigger, more professionalized, more standardized would be better.

Each time, they were wrong.

The evidence is overwhelming that small, locally controlled, relationship-based education works better than industrial-scale institutions. The 1924 Texas study demonstrated it. Contemporary research on school size confirms it. Microschool families experience it daily.

Yet we continue believing that scale and bureaucracy improve education, despite a century of failure. We keep making the same mistakes because we refuse to learn from history.

Dame schools weren’t perfect. Neither were one-room schools. Neither are microschools. But they all share essential features that enable effective education: human scale, personal relationships, community control, teacher autonomy, and responsiveness to local needs.

These features don’t depend on historical circumstances. They’re not artifacts of less sophisticated times. They’re fundamental principles of how human learning works.

Humans learn best in small groups with consistent relationships. Children thrive when teachers know them personally and can adapt to their individual needs. Parents make better educational decisions for their children than distant bureaucrats do. Communities invest more in schools they control directly. Teachers teach better when freed from bureaucratic constraints.

These truths were obvious to our ancestors. They operated dame schools for centuries without needing education research to justify them. They built one-room schools because they worked, not because studies proved their effectiveness.

Then we forgot or rather, we were convinced to ignore what we knew in favor of expert theories about efficiency and standardization.

The Choice Ahead

Microschooling “embodies this principle [parent choice] by decentralizing education and putting power into the hands of those closest to the students.” It represents not innovation but restoration, a return to principles that worked for centuries before we abandoned them.

The question is whether we’ll allow this restoration or repeat the mistakes that destroyed dame schools and one-room schools.

Reformers are already mobilizing to regulate microschools into conformity or out of existence. They demand teacher certification requirements that would exclude capable instructors without proper credentials. They push facility standards that would make home-based schools impossible. They advocate curriculum mandates that would eliminate diversity in educational approach. They call for standardized testing that would force teaching to tests rather than teaching children.

If they succeed, microschools will follow dame schools and one-room schools into extinction. We’ll have eliminated another effective educational model in favor of theories about what should work instead of what actually does work.

Or we might learn from history. We might recognize that the pattern of destroy-small-schools-then-realize-we-made-a-mistake has played out enough times. We might acknowledge that our ancestors weren’t primitive fools who needed experts to rescue them from their own ignorance. They were solving real problems with effective solutions.

We might realize that dame schools, one-room schools, and microschools all succeed for the same fundamental reasons: they operate at human scale, preserve personal relationships, enable community control, and trust teachers to teach.

We might finally learn that bigger isn’t better, standardization doesn’t improve learning, and bureaucracy doesn’t increase effectiveness.

We might remember what the dame schools taught us three centuries ago: education works best when it happens in communities, at human scale, responsive to local needs rather than distant mandates.

The choice is ours. We can repeat history by destroying microschools in pursuit of standardization and control. Or we can finally learn from history and protect the small schools that actually work.

Our ancestors knew the answer. The question is whether we’re wise enough to listen.

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The Department of Education website says the following:

“In the 1860s, a budget of $15,000 and four employees handled education fact-finding. By 1965, the Office of Education had more than 2,100 employees and a budget of $1.5 billion. As of mid-2010, the Department has nearly 4,300 employees and a budget of about $60 billion.”

In the hundred-year period from the 1860s to 1960s, during which it was merely an “office”, its personnel and budget still enormously increased. Clearly the growth of the “Office of Education” was not limited during its time as a mere “office”.

It happened through a powerful organization called the National Education Association (NEA). The political influence that this organization wields will pose a challenge to the free education of American citizens, even if the Federal Department of Education is dismantled.

National Education Association

The National Education Association was founded (under the name of “National Teachers Association”) in 1857. It was intended to be an organization made up of teachers to serve the needs of teachers. Thomas Valentin, President of the New York Teachers Association, told the teachers gathered that the NTA would

“gather up and arrange the educational statistics of our country, so that people may know what is really being done for Public Education, and what yet remains to be done.”

Valentin hoped that the United States would eventually have a department of education, but until that time, the NEA was needed. At the second annual meeting of the NTA, in the last year of his life, Horace Mann gave the speech, “The Teacher’s Motives.”

Other speeches at this first meeting of the NTA also called for a Department of Education in the federal government. Zalmon Richards, the first president of the NTA said,

“The subject of a National Bureau of Education, to be connected with the Department of the Interior at Washington, has often been spoken of, and urged, as worthy of Congressional legislation. Hitherto it has not met with that favor which its friends believe it deserves, especially from that portion of our fellow-citizens who are jealous of anything like a centralization of power, and who believe that all legislative power upon the subject of Education belongs to the several States.”

At NTA annual meetings, speakers rallied support for a Department of Education and made references to efforts by various NTA members to get Congress to consider the idea.

Finally, in 1867, Congress approved the establishment of the Department of Education, with a budget of $15,000, a commissioner, and three assistants. The following year, however, congress demoted the four-person department to the status of “Office of Education,” due to fears that a national department might exert too much control over local educational policies in the states.

In 1870, the NTA expanded its power when it merged with the American Normal School Association, the National Association of School Superintendents, and the Central College Association. Upon this merge, the NTA changed its name to the National Education Association (NEA).

Growth As an Office

How did the “Office of Education” grow its budget so much from 1867 to 1965?

Even with inflation taken into account, the growth in budget was enormous. $15,000 in 1867 dollars is roughly equivalent to $54,000 in 1965, so the growth was approximately 28,000-fold.

Similarly, as a percentage of the country’s GDP, the growth was astounding. The $15,000 initially appropriated to the Department of Education was merely 0.0002% of the 1867 GDP of approximately $8.5 billion. In contrast, the $1.5 billion appropriation in 1965 was approximately 4%. This yields an increase of approximately 23,000-fold. Either way you look at it, this growth is remarkable. So how did it happen?

The driving force behind the steady increase in federal funding for education was a non-governmental organization called the National Education Association. Although Thomas Valentin had told other members that the NEA was only necessary up until the point when the U.S. had its own Department of Education, the NEA continued and still continues to lobby for federal funding for education. In 1889, a committee of the NEA urged legislators that "the Bureau of Education should be restored to its original position as an independent department." In 1918, the NEA set up its headquarters in Washington and created a Legislative Commission drafted and submitted legislation to Congress. In 1921, the NEA Journal, started running a column in every issue that detailed the status of legislation related to education, urging members to write their legislators for support. Samuel Blumenfeld details the efforts made by the NEA in his book, “NEA - Trojan Horse in American Education.”

By 1964, the NEA was sponsoring weekend “Teacher-In-Politics” training workshops, with the purpose of inspiring and aiding teachers to become active in politics at the service of NEA-driven goals.

After years being lobbied by the NEA, Congress approved the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, with an initial appropriation of $1.3 billion. This act granted a yearly payout to be administered to schools based on the school meeting certain requirements. The majority of this money was administered to schools with over 40% of their students from lower-income families. In 2023, the ESEA appropriated $29.3 billion.

The success of the 1965 ESEA did not satisfy the NEA. NEA president Sam Lambert said the following in his inaugural speech:

“NEA last year had 1,030,000 members; and by the end of this year we will have at least 1,100,000 . . . . We are already four times as large as any other professional organization in this country. Within a few years we will be six or seven times as large. And, beginning now we are going to put our power and influence to work for the things that are most important:

NEA will become a stronger and more influential advocate of social changes long overdue. . . .

NEA will become a political power second to no other special interest group . . . .

NEA will have more and more to say about how a teacher is educated, whether he should be admitted to the profession, and depending on his behavior and ability whether he should stay in the profession. . . .

And, finally, NEA will organize this profession from top to bottom into logical operating units that can move easily and effectively and with power unmatched by any other organized group.

Re-establishing the Department of Education

In 1976, for the first time in 119 years of its existence, the NEA endorsed a presidential candidate: Jimmy Carter. And he won. The NEA endorsed a total of 323 candidates for House positions and 26 for Senate that year. Of these endorsed candidates, 272 won in the House and 19 won in the Senate.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter repaid the favor by signing a bill to establish the Department of Education once again. After a 122-year wait, the NEA was given back what it had asked for in 1857, and the Department of Education could act on its own, expanding the power of the NEA.

This article contains similar content to an article I published on The Public Discourse in June, 2025.

Horace Mann and I have a couple things in common:

1. We're both natives of Franklin, Massachusetts.

2. We're both passionate about education.

That's where the similarities end (I hope).

Mann was a politician, a utopian, and ultimately, a man whose good intentions paved the road to educational disaster.

Born in 1796, just twenty years after America declared independence from Great Britain, Mann earned the title "The Father of American Public Education."

This noble designation is frankly not one that he would likely be proud of today.

His intentions were admirable. The results? Catastrophic.

Three fundamental mistakes in his approach to education continue to plague American schools today.

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The Making of an Educational Revolutionary

Mann’s inauspicious beginning was graduating valedictorian from Brown University in 1819, when he gave a speech titled, "The Progressive Character of the Human Race."

The speech has been lost, but we can only guess at its contents.

After studying law and serving in the Massachusetts legislature, in 1837 he was elected the first Massachusetts Secretary of the Board of Education, a position that would reshape American education forever.

In 1839, Mann delivered a speech called "The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government," where he outlined his comprehensive vision of education. He defined education as far more than basic literacy: it should include physical training for health, manual skills for employment, scientific understanding, and most importantly, moral and religious formation.

His vision wasn't entirely wrong.

But the devil is in the details.

Mistake #1: Government Control Is the Answer

Mann's first catastrophic error was his unwavering faith that government-controlled education was superior to local, community-based solutions.

He believed centralized control and standardization of curriculum and teacher-training would ensure consistency and quality.

In practice, it ignored the diversity of local communities and their specific needs.

His journal entry reveals his grandiose vision: he saw public education as

"…a spring, almost imperceptible, flowing from the highest table-land, between oceans, which is destined to deepen and widen as it descends, diffusing fertility and beauty in its course; and nations shall dwell upon its banks."

Beautiful poetry. Terrible policy.

This romantic vision blinded him to the dangers of scaling up the control of education.

Concentrating educational power in government hands meant concentrating the power to shape young minds in political hands who know little about education and who care little for the children.

What could go wrong?

The Utopian Connection

In 1835, Mann met the Peabody sisters: Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia. All three were deeply involved with the Transcendentalist Club and its offshoot, the utopian socialist community Brook Farm.

Mann’s political life required that he steer clear of unpopular radical movements like Transcendentalism. His writings and speeches leave no trace of his connection.

But actions speak louder than words.

In 1843, Mann married Mary Peabody in Elizabeth's bookstore. The same place where Sophia had married Nathaniel Hawthorne three months earlier. The Peabody sisters later established the first kindergarten in the U.S. based on principles developed by Friedrich Froebel, who had in turn been influenced by Robert Owen's socialist ideas.

The transcendentalist movement, with its utopian socialist ideals, influenced Mann's thinking about education as a tool for social transformation. Mann, as politicians do, absorbed these influences without acknowledging them publicly.

Mistake #2: Education without religion

Though Mann was a Unitarian minister and not explicitly anti-Christian, his personal writings reveal a preference for "natural religion" over "revealed religion." In his diary, he wrote that natural religion is as superior to revealed religion "as the rising sun is to the day-star that preceded it."

This wasn't just his theology. It became his educational policy.

Mann created for himself an impossible challenge: remove religious instruction from schools and retain moral education without being anti-religious. His solution in the Third Annual Report (1839) was to approve only books that aligned with the majority of religions. His goal was moral formation, but mass-produced.

The result? A watered-down, lowest-common-denominator approach to moral instruction that satisfied no one.

Sound familiar?

Thus began our ongoing struggle with religious and moral instruction in public education. A problem that persists today because Mann's "solution" was fundamentally flawed.

You cannot teach morality without teaching about its source.

You cannot form character while remaining neutral about what constitutes good character. As Ryan Anderson said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in April 2025,

“There is no neutrality on religion.”

Mann's attempt at religiously neutral education created education empty of religion and morality. But “nature abhors a vacuum,” and religious secularism has filled in the void.

Mistake #3: The Perfect System Exists

Mann's third devastating mistake was believing he had imported educational perfection from Prussia.

In 1843, he and his new wife took a six-week honeymoon in Europe, visiting schools, prisons, and asylums. He was particularly impressed by Prussian and Scottish schools.

Upon his return, Mann composed his "Seventh Annual Report." He claimed to have visited “hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of scholars” in the short span of six weeks. He denounced the best American schools as mere "dormitories" compared to Prussia's "lively classrooms," criticizing the Boston schoolmasters as “ignorant” and “incompetent.”

Big mistake.

The Association of Boston Schoolmasters wrote a rebuttal, “Remarks on the 7th Annual Report,” where they utterly tear Mann’s accusations apart, pointing out the following:

1. Mann had no experience teaching: he should try to judge good from bad teaching.

2. Mann was ignorant: he exaggerated the poor quality of Boston schools, which he rarely visited.

3. Mann was just a man: he could not have adequately judged “hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of scholars” in the span of six weeks.

Interestingly enough, George B. Emerson, cousin of famous transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a rebuttal to their remarks consisting primarily in ad hominem attacks. This again testifies to Mann’s deep connections to Transcendentalism.

The Prussian Disaster

Based on his Prussian observations, Mann implemented several changes to Massachusetts schools:

• Age-segregated classes: Children were placed in classes by age regardless of ability or aptitude.

• Lecture-based instruction: Students were lectured by teachers instead of learning from each other or from books.

• Moral indoctrination: Greater emphasis on teaching morals and socializing children to be "good citizens."

• The whole-word reading method: A disastrous approach that would later contribute to widespread illiteracy.

• Female teachers preferred: Mann instigated a shift away from male educators.

• Reduced punishments and rewards: Discouragement of traditional motivational methods.

• Written exams instead of oral exams: Standardized assessment methods facilitated higher level control.

• Grades instead of rankings: Grades and report cards, Mann hoped, would provide feedback to parents and to the state that was objective and based on established standards.

• Simultaneous method adopted across the state: Mann worked to eliminate one-room schoolhouses and monitorial schools across the state. Again, the goal was homogeneity, “equalizing the conditions of men.”

While some of these changes had some merit, they represented a systematic shift toward centralized control and standardized approaches that reduced local flexibility and teacher autonomy.

The Prussian system was explicitly designed to produce obedient, submissive citizens with nationalist tendencies.

Public opinion recognized this danger and so did Mann. Nevertheless, he argued that if Prussia’s methods could

"pervert benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions."

Mann's reasoning contained a fatal flaw.

He believed that methods designed to create submission and obedience could somehow be redirected to create free, independent citizens. But as he himself described it, these methods involved

"moral power over the understandings and affections of the people"

This is a form of control that no republican government should wield.

How can methods inherently designed to subvert human nature and independent thinking ever produce good results?

German Nationalism

History classes tend to gloss over the connection between Prussian totalitarianism and German nationalism. This totalitarian state with the first public education system in the world was the admiration of governments worldwide. This admiration came to a screeching halt when Germany was at the core of two World Wars.

A totalitarian state with a national system of public education can most effectively sway the minds and hearts of her people one way or another.

Nazism was only possible because of Prussia’s national(ist) public education system. Just read Fichte, the philosophical father of Prussia’s education system.

The Whole-Word Reading Catastrophe

A concrete example of Mann's flawed ideas about teaching was the whole-word reading method he imported from Prussia. Instead of teaching children letters and phonics first, students were taught to recognize entire words as symbols. Though initially resisted by parents and educators, this method was later embraced by progressive reformers like John Dewey.

The results were catastrophic. By 1940, nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population was functionally illiterate due to the widespread adoption of this method. Methods of reading have come and gone since, with Lucy Calkins leading the most recent charge.

Mann's Misplaced Optimism

In his 12th and final report as Secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts (1848), Mann revealed his extraordinary confidence in public education's transformative power:

"[The] Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization."

He saw two reasons for this optimism: first, its universal application to all children, and second, the malleable nature of young minds. But Mann failed to recognize that these same characteristics made public education equally capable of causing enormous harm in the wrong hands.

Mann unwittingly created a system with unprecedented power over young minds. His faith in government-controlled education, combined with his belief in imported "scientific" methods and his dismissal of parental authority, established patterns that continue to plague American education today.

Good Intentions, Lasting Damage

Horace Mann was undoubtedly well-intentioned. He genuinely wanted to improve education and create a more moral, prosperous society. Unlike some educational reformers, he didn't hold séances with spirits or embrace the most radical socialist ideas of his time, though he was certainly influenced by them.

Nevertheless, his three fundamental mistakes created problems that persist today.

Good intentions are not enough. The road to educational mediocrity was paved with the good intentions of reformers who believed they could engineer better outcomes through government control and systematic approaches, while ignoring the irreplaceable role of parents, local communities, and individual teachers.

The question now is whether we can learn from Mann's mistakes and return to approaches teach morality imbued with religion, and recognize that there are no perfect systems, only parents, teachers and local communities doing their best.

Unfortunately, Mann’s mistakes were carried forward by later educational reformers like John Dewey, the “Father of Progressive Education.” But before Dewey came onto the scene, other reformers and political organizations damaged American education in the spirit of Mann, to the point where Dewey felt called upon to rescue it.

These and more stories still to come…

In 1844, Horace Mann returned from his Prussian honeymoon with a souvenir that would reshape American education forever.

Not a cuckoo clock. Not beer steins.

The "simultaneous method."

The revolutionary idea was to teach all children the same content at the same pace.

It swept through Massachusetts schools. One-room schoolhouses vanished. Monitorial schools disappeared.

Mann toured the country evangelizing his imported innovation. State after state adopted his "efficient" system.

This is the story of how we traded effectiveness for efficiency. And why we're still paying the price.

A system designed for financial efficiency has become the gold standard for education today. We take it for granted. Efficient? Yes. Effective? Not at all.

Children are sorted into grades based on age and are expected to advance at the same pace.

But here's the thing:

Children mature intellectually, emotionally, and physically at drastically different paces.

Why do we expect a system based on date of womb-exit to succeed?

To understand how we arrived at this absurdity, we must start with two saints whose charity became our curse.

Good Intentions

St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle (1651-1719) and St. Peter Fourier (1565-1640) are two of the greatest predecessors of modern educational reformers, though they are infrequently cited by education historians. The ideas of both are at the heart of the structure of the modern classroom.

Check out my earlier article on St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle.

St. Peter Fourier was a natural teacher. At the age of 15, he was asked by neighbors to teach the children of his town. He was ordained a priest in 1589, and ultimately studied patristic theology in university. It is said that he knew the Summa Theologiae by heart. He founded the Congregation of Notre Dame, with the charism of teaching poor girls for free. He is said to have been the first to use blackboards in the classroom.

Fourier and La Salle both pioneered the “simultaneous method” by which students were placed in different classes based on age. They received lessons simultaneously instead of being instructed one-on-one, which was the norm prior to this method. The method held enormous financial appeal because a single teacher could give instruction to many students at once, instead of tutoring students one at a time.

La Salle and Fourier both identified a model designed for the poor who could afford no better. We use this same system today and spend over $17,000 per student each year.

How are we so ineffective?

The Simultaneous Method in Prussia

The Prussian (now German) government was the first in the world to have a state-run education system. Beginning in the 1700s, Prussia showed increasing interest in education, mandating primary education (ages 5-14) and establishing publicly-funded schools in 1763.

The Prussians had clear intentions for their educational system. Johann Ignaz von Felbiger (1724-1788), a minister in the Prussian government, revealed the underlying philosophy:

“They must be convinced that it is useful and correct to follow the schoolmaster’s wishes. Only then will they learn to obey even in situations where force is absent. In this way, the schoolmaster accomplishes his most important task: his pupils will observe their duties not only in school, but throughout their lives.”1

The goal was not discipline for the sake of lifelong learning, but discipline for the sake of lifelong obedience to the state.

Johann Julius Hecker

Johann Julius Hecker (1707-1768) was a Prussian pastor and educator under the reign of Frederick William I. He started the first publicly funded schools in Prussia. In 1748, over fifty years after de La Salle's normal schools were started in France, Hecker also founded normal schools for teacher training in Prussia.

These schools conveyed to teachers the curriculum, pedagogy, and ideology of the government that funded them.

Sound familiar (ahem…teacher certification programs).

Hecker’s schools were called “Realschule”, and were aimed at practical education in order to prepare students for work at manual trades. This contrasted with the liberal education provided by the private schools which taught children to think. Later in Prussia’s history, the publicly funded schools would take a short-lived turn toward classical/liberal education with the educational philosophy of Humboldt.

Frederick the Great, son of Frederick William I, became emperor in 1740. He was a strong proponent of Hecker’s educational ideas. In 1763, Frederick the Great signed the first mandatory education law in the world.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

It’s 1806. The Prussian people are humiliated.

Napoleon had defeated them at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt in a devastating show of military tactics, discipline, and common sense. At Auerstedt, the Prussians troops outnumbered the French by more than two to one.

In 1807, Frederick William III of Prussia heard Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was the educational philosopher who would reshape Prussia's approach to schooling. He did not live to see the golden age of Prussian public education, but his ideas motivated and inspired Frederick William III’s dramatic educational reforms.

That same year, Frederick William III entrusted Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) with the role of reforming education in Prussia. Humboldt was studying classics while serving as ambassador to Rome at the time and somewhat reluctantly accepted. In 1809, Humboldt invited Fichte to join the newly founded University of Berlin (now Humboldt University) as one of its first philosophy professors. Fichte delivered the inaugural address. Together, the two thinkers shaped an education system that prioritized national unity over individual liberty. Through their reforms, the first public education in the world began in Prussia.

Some highlights from Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation can help to illustrate his educational philosophy.

1. Homogenize the people

In his Addresses to the German Nation, Johann Gottlieb Fichte explains that the new education will mold the German people into a homogenous group.

"By means of the new education we want to mold the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its members by the same interests…So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its individual members…In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education." (Addresses to the German Nation, p. 15)

German nationalism was established through education.

2. Destroy Free Will

Fichte's most chilling insight was that the old way of education failed because it appealed to individual freedom. His national unity came at the expense of individual freedom. Respecting a pupil's free will, the old education failed, whereas his proposed system aimed to eradicate free will entirely.

"That very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility. For, by confessing that after all its most powerful efforts the will still remains free, that is, hesitating undecided between good and evil, it confesses that it neither is able , nor wishes , nor longs to fashion the will and (since the latter is the very root of man) man himself, and that it considers this altogether impossible . On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.” (Addresses to the German Nation, p. 20, emphasis added)

A denial or destructing of free will is one of the key errors made by educational reformers, as I have already described in Three Lies and Three Truths.

Instead of fostering and cultivating human freedom, Fichte proposed to stifle human freedom, to "destroy it," and fashion a will that is not free, but is infallible (in the eyes of the state, at least).

3. Educate Indoctrinate them to Obey

Fichte saw education as a tool to fashion individuals according to the desires of the state.

“If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him ; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will…The education proposed by me, therefore, is to be a reliable and deliberate art for fashioning in man a stable and infallible good will. That is its first characteristic." (Addresses to the German Nation, p. 21)

In her book, Raised to Obey: the Rise of Mass Education, Agustina Paglayan demonstrates that governments worldwide invested in public education systems in order to indoctrinate children to obey. Paglayan, a professor of political science at University of California San Diego, uses data analytics and historical research to justify the argument. That Prussia invested in public education for the purpose of indoctrination was a widely known fact at the time of Horace Mann. Maybe other governments just did a better job hiding it.

There are obvious problems his understanding of the nature of human freedom and the purpose of education. These problems were tragically manifested in the totalitarian state that led to the World Wars of the 20th century.

Fichte left a lasting mark on the system. The production of disciplined and obedient citizens became hallmarks of the Prussian model. While his reforms modernized education and provided universal access to it, they also set a precedent for using education as a tool of the state.

Prussia’s Influence

Victor Cousin (France), Horace Mann (United States), and Domingo Sarmiento (Argentina) are among some of the educational reformers who visited Prussia first and went on to spread the idea that moral education by the government was important. When Mann visited, the Prussian school system already had a reputation for indoctrinating obedience and docility in the students. Mann believed that Prussia’s methods could still be used as means towards a positive end.

Simultaneous Method in American Public Schools

The simultaneous method is the classroom structure that is nearly ubiquitous today, so much so that few people would think to question its existence.

But it wasn’t always this way...

Common schools, the predecessors to “public schools,” were increasing in popularity and importance at the start of the 19th century. Two kinds of schools were prominent at the time: the one-room schoolhouse and the monitorial school. In a one-room school, a single teacher taught children of all ages in the same room. Monitorial schools utilized student-instructors (“monitors”) to help teach 200-1000 students in a given class. In both models, it was understood that students and teachers alike provided instruction. The teacher was the authority and disciplinarian, but students were also given important responsibilities.

Horace Mann learned about the simultaneous method and normal schools from his visit to Prussia in the mid 1800s2. This visit was actually the honeymoon with his wife, Mary Peabody Mann. They were married in the Transcendentalist Club on May 1, 1843 and then toured Europe for the next several months, visiting public schools, insane asylums, and government officials.

When Mann tried to introduce the simultaneous method into public schools monitorial schools were the dominant alternative. Arguments for and against the monitorial system are presented in a very objective manner in a beautiful historical document from the founding of the “American Institute for Instruction.”

The Cost of Efficiency

The simultaneous method is undeniably efficient. All students in the class learn the same material at the same pace. It saves money, time, and resources.

Individualized instruction for each student seems like an impossible dream.

But is it? One-room schoolhouses seem to indicate it's not impossible at all.

Is a one-size-fits-all approach really the ideal? Common sense observation of childhood maturation suggest otherwise.

Students make excellent teachers when guided effectively. The monitorial system recognized this truth.

What if a missing element of the teacher's role is to be a teacher of teachers? To guide students in teaching each other, rather than merely distributing information?

The simultaneous method was born of charity, weaponized by tyranny, and adopted by democracy.

Perhaps it's time to question whether efficiency should remain our highest educational value.

The simultaneous method had traveled from saints' charity to Prussian control. Its final transformation from foreign authoritarianism to American democracy would prove the most unlikely of all.

Join me next week as we uncover how Horace Mann repackaged tyranny as progress and convinced a free people to embrace it.

That was wrong. I am sorry.

Realizing my mistake made me want to press ctrl+Z on my short writing career.

After wallowing in misery for an hour or so, I asked a writer-friend for advice. Here it is (paraphrased):

Instead of disappearing into a footnote-sized hole, do what every educator claims to value: correct yourself.

Come clean with it, and tell all your readers about your mistake.

OK. “Absolutely right,” I thought. I hate reading something only to find out later it was false.

So my self-imposed “penance” was to do a deep dive into La Salle and write an article.

As usual, though, the dive was refreshing. And in the process, I learned something, not just about La Salle, but about the foundation of the school system we’re still living in today.

La Salle and his Schools

In 1684, six years after he became a priest, St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle founded the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. “The purpose of this Institute,” as stated in the 1718 Common Rules, “is to give a Christian education to children.” La Salle envisioned lay educators providing low-cost or free education to poor children. His followers published a complete description of his methods in 1720 in his posthumous work, “The Conduct of the Christian Schools.”

He was greatly influenced by Jacques de Bathencour, a parish priest who taught for 18 years in Paris. Bathencour published a book called The Parish School in 1654, meant as a manual for seminarians. The first half of the book gave the philosophical and theological arguments for a teacher’s authority and role.

La Salle’s Conduct of Christian Schools was a much more practical manual, omitting any theology and philosophy of teaching.

For anyone who been a first-year teacher, clear, practical advice is like gold. And a philosophical tract on teaching is about as useful to a new teacher as the Chinese section of the refrigerator user’s manual.

Normal Schools: for Teachers, not Priests

La Salle’s vision for his educational institution was radically new in other ways as well.

He wanted the teachers in his schools to be lay brothers, not priests.

Up until his time, Christians trusted only the clergy to teach at their schools. La Salle bucked the trend by saying that his teachers would be laymen who saw their vocation first and foremost as teachers.

Why?

La Salle was not trying to be a revolutionary. He just saw a need and met it.

Training priests was a major investment of time and resources. The Jesuit seminarian, for example, spent five years studying classics and classical languages followed by three years of philosophy, and then some level of theological training.

Eight years at least.

Also, priests needed to administer sacraments, preach the Gospel, and pastor their flock. Some priests were also called to be teachers — and good thing, too. They make excellent teachers!

But La Salle wanted teachers, not priests.

He wanted teachers of reading, writing, arithmetic, and (most importantly) the Christian faith. He did not have the funds or time to invest in an eight-year training program. He wanted teachers for children who were too poor to afford a fancy private school and for orphans who had no parents as primary educators.

What about teacher training? La Salle set up schools to maintain proper norms of Christian conduct, piety, and teaching. Normal schools were like the predecessors to our modern teacher training programs. Teachers spent “only a few years” in these schools. Religious teaching orders had already established normal schools, but La Salle’s normal schools were for lay teachers, not religious or clergy.

In 1685, he set up his first ecole normal in Riems, France.

The Simultaneous Method

As early as the 17th century, La Salle’s schools used the “simultaneous method” of teaching. This was a novel method at the time, but commonplace today. By this method, students are placed in separate classrooms based on capacity and/or age. They receive instruction from one teacher “simultaneously” instead of receiving individual tutoring.

Lasallian schools first came to the United States in 1845 when Brother John McMullin started Calvert Hall in Baltimore, MD, but the simultaneous method would be introduced in the United States by Horace Mann via Prussia.

Oddly enough, Mann introduced the simultaneous method to Massachusetts in 1843, just 6 years after the first Lasallian school started in North America (1837 in Montreal, Canada).

This week’s article in the Schools and Schooling series will focus in on the Simultaneous Method and how Prussia and Mann turned a tool for teaching into a tool for control.

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Monitors and Supervisors

St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle did appoint "Monitors" (and Supervisors) from among the ranks of the best students.1

Monitors silently watched the students while the teacher was absent and gave a complete report to the teacher of everything they saw. Their job was not to correct behavior, just to report on it.

They were not allowed to speak with other students and needed to remain in an assigned spot when they were "on duty." It was to be made clear to the monitors that their job above all was to be a model for others.

Supervisors were like the teacher's "secret agents." They were secretly appointed by the teacher to watch the Monitors. It was like a system of checks and balances.

Discipline

Confident that children were free and responsible agents, La Salle’s approach to discipline was revolutionary for his time.

There are some children to whose conduct their parents pay very little attention, sometimes none at all. From morning until evening, they do only what they please…

Kids misbehave.

But what was La Salle’s remedy?

…If they are of a bold and haughty spirit, they should be given some charge or responsibility in the school, such as Monitor, if they are considered qualified, or Collector of Papers.

Give misbehaving children greater responsibility!

La Salle wasn't naive about children's behavior. He knew correction was necessary at times, but understood that misbehaving children often need responsibility, not punishment.

I wouldn’t consider myself a veteran teacher yet, but with ten years of teaching under my belt, I totally agree with his insight.

No child is bad. No kid is rotten. All children want to be good.

Entrust a misbehaving kid with more challenge, not less. You’ll be amazed.

La Salle’s Death

When La Salle died in 1719, there were 274 Brothers of the Christian Schools.

Eighty years later, there were 10,000.

In 1900, La Salle was canonized a saint and the number of Christian Brothers had grown to 14,000.

Since then, the number of brothers has shrunk to 4,000, but there are 74,000 lay colleagues teaching over a million students in nearly 80 countries.

Final Thoughts

Reflecting on my mistake about St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle, I realized it reflects something key to my message on What Schools Forget:

If we want to fix the system we’ve inherited, we have to stop repeating the mistakes of the people who built it. That starts with owning our own.

La Salle’s path was not easy.

He was a revolutionary without wanting to be.

He taught in French because none of the poor children could (or needed to) speak Latin.

He opened schools for all, charging only what parents could pay (sometimes nothing).

St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle loved his students.

He fought for them. He taught them. He taught others to do the same.

His heart went out to the poor and the orphans who were placed at such a moral and intellectual disadvantage through no fault of their own.

Resources

• https://www.lasalle.org/en/lasallian-holiness/st-john-baptist-de-la-salle/

• “Conduct of the Christian Schools” by St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle:
  https://lasallian.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Conduct-2007-reprint.pdf

• https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/09/13/how-st-john-baptist-de-la-salle-brought-education-millions-poor-kids-me

Picture one teacher instructing 1,000 students simultaneously. Successfully.

Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell invented the system a century later when the industrial revolution required it. In The British System of Education (1810), Joseph Lancaster describes the building layout:

THE best form for a school-room is a long square, or parallelogram. All the desks should front the head of the school, that the master may have a good view of each boy at once; the desks should all be single desks, and every boy sit with his face towards the head of the school. (Joseph Lancaster, “The British System of Education”, 1810)

I encourage you to follow the link above and just read a few excerpts. The tone is eminently practical and based on the firsthand experiences of dedicated teachers. But a bit jarring…

Where’s the vision? the ideals?

These books are definitely not meant to inspire vocations to the teaching profession. They are purely practical - about as enjoyable as reading the owner’s manual to your refrigerator.

Not gonna lie, I enjoy reading these books…and owners manuals — that’s probably why I’m writing this and nobody else is.

But what lessons can the monitorial system offer us today? What wisdom did we discard when these schools disappeared?

Urbanizing the One-Room Schoolhouse

For around two hundred years, one-room schoolhouses dominated American education and delivered strong results.

But early 1800s reformers demanded universal public schooling. These single room schools served small groups well but couldn't handle urban populations. Reformers needed a new model. Like the industrial revolution's factories, monitorial schools emphasized efficiency and scale.

Joseph Lancaster developed his own version of monitorial schools in late 18th-century England to teach poor children cheaply. Older children had long helped younger ones in rural one-room schoolhouses, but Lancaster's industrialized version gained support as the United States embraced the Industrial Revolution.

Teachers and monitors began each day early. Before other students arrived, teachers gave monitors brief but advanced lessons. These top students needed less time but could handle deeper material than their peers. The monitors might also gather wood, start the fire, or make. small breakfast for the army of students about to arrive.

Monitors distributed books and slates, tracked attendance, evaluated student work, and promoted pupils who mastered their level, regardless of peers' progress. The curriculum covered reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic, emphasizing memorization.

Small groups of around ten children followed a single monitor. Monitors taught their assigned groups using wall charts, reducing textbook needs. Pupils stood in semicircles around these displays and used slates or sand tables rather than paper and ink. As schools grew in size, military-style movement maintained the discipline essential for success.

The Rise of Monitorial Schools in the USA

Monitorial pedagogy industrialized one-room schoolhouses for urban areas with many students and few teachers. American schools used this approach for decades before Horace Mann imported Prussia's system in the mid-1800s.

Lancaster published his book in 1810, though Dr. Andrew Bell published a nearly identical method one year earlier. The models differed only in religious instruction. Lancaster, a Quaker, used nonsectarian teaching, while Bell, an Anglican, followed the Church of England. Our Founding Fathers’ love for religious freedom led us to embrace nonsectarian teaching in public schools. Lancaster’s nonsectarian religious instruction defeated that of Dr. Andrew Bell.

The monitorial schools advanced free public schooling by lowering costs and proving children could learn faster and cheaper. Monitor training schools became the forerunners of American normal schools. Historian Dell Upton relates that Lancastrian Monitorial methods were adopted “up and down the Atlantic seaboard as the official pedagogy of emerging public schools”:

New York City (1805), Albany (1810), Georgetown (1811), Washington, D.C. (1812), Philadelphia (1817), Boston (1824), Baltimore (1829)

Lancaster visited the United States in 1818 and was surprised to see how firmly his method had taken hold.

The Fall of Monitorial Schools

The monitorial model thrived in American cities because it solved a resource problem: too many students, too few teachers. But it went beyond that.

Students learned effectively from peers. Bright children handled major educational responsibility. They were also based on the one-room schoolhouse and close-knit communities. It was ahead of its time: respecting learning differences, personalizing education, and encouraging cooperative learning.

But, the model failed when it became mechanical and impersonal.

The system succeeded when relationships and individual attention were a priority, but collapsed when efficiency dominated.

Sound familiar??

Then the teachers of New England spoke out against it.

They cared about the school-children. About true education.

They realized the monitorial system was turning children to cogs in a machine.

Here are a few of the concerns they expressed:

1. Joseph Lancaster chose embarrassment over (severe) corporal punishment. Below is a sampling of his methods (taken directly from his book):

   THE LOG

   On a repeated or frequent offense, after admonition has failed, the lad…places a wooden log round his neck, which serves as a pillory, and with this he is sent to his seat.

   THE BASKET.

   Occasionally boys are put in a sack, or in a basket, suspended to the roof of the school, in sight of all the pupils, who frequently smile at the birds in the cage.

   CONFINEMENT AFTER SCHOOL HOURS.

   Few punishments are so effectual as confinement after school hours…tying them to the desks, or putting them in logs, &c. in such a manner that they cannot loose themselves.

   I suppose criticizing 1800s disciplinary methods from my biased modern cultural perspective is unfair.

   …but really, Joe?

   Talk about psychological damage.

   

2. Teachers argue that the system produced “superficial and inaccurate scholars.” Instruction had become “solely and purely mechanical,” limited to memorizing answers from a chart. Lancaster's The British System of Education reads like a legal document, detailing exactly how teachers and monitors should teach and respond to scenarios. Young monitors proved “unfaithful and not competent,” especially in subjects requiring deeper understanding like languages or complex mathematics.

3. They also complained of the “confused uproar” and “motley medley of vociferations,” in classrooms where hundreds recited simultaneously.

   

4. Critics also complained of lack of individualized teacher attention. Large classes and monitor dependence kept teachers from knowing each pupil's “particular merits and failings.” This hindered intellectual development and critical thinking.

5. They complained of ill-trained teachers. After observing European schools during his honeymoon trip in 1844, Horace Mann stressed teachers' ability to teach “from a full mind” without pre-prepared questions or rote answers. Lancaster trusted his system more than individual teachers:

   What a master says should be done; but if he teaches on this system, he will find the authority is not personal, that when the pupils, as well as the school-master, understand how to act and learn on this system, the system, not the master's vague, discretionary, uncertain judgment, will be in practice. (“The British Education System”, Lancaster)

   Mann advocated for “normal schools” (we call them “teacher certification programs”) to train teachers. These had been designed and implemented centuries earlier by St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle at a smaller scale (and that’s really the key isn’t it?).

6. In 1844, the Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools called the monitorial system “promising much, but effecting little” and leading to “utter futility.” They saw it as one doomed movement among many. The association emphasized experienced teachers and feared that without deep engagement, pupils would retain little. Mann heard these comments but ignored their warning against adopting Prussia's totalitarian system, which would dominate American education.

Horace Mann opposed the monitorial system. He championed Normal Schools (teacher training institutions). Though monitorial systems trained young students daily as future teachers, Mann deemed this insufficient. Soon only teachers trained in Prussian-model normal schools could secure public school positions.

Mann didn’t save the day by opposing monitorial schools, he simply replaced one system with another…

Final Thoughts

The switch from monitorial school to monitorial system was the beginning of the end.

Educational reformers, inspired by the successes of the industrial revolution, sought the most efficient method for producing educated children.

But they forgot something: children aren’t products on a production line.

Teachers rejected the monitorial system for its rigidity, rote learning emphasis, and incompetent instructors. Could not some of these same accusations be appropriately made of popular teaching methods in modern schools?

Consider the parallels:

Today's classrooms emphasize rote memorization for standardized tests, create “noise and confusion” with simultaneous activities, and rely on undertrained assistants or inexperienced teachers. They worried about individualized attention in classes of hundreds. What about thirty students with one overwhelmed teacher following a scripted curriculum?

Reformers replaced the monitorial system with the “simultaneous method”: the age-graded, teacher-centered model we know today.

Understanding this transition reveals something crucial:

We are doomed to repeat history if we don't analyze the past

The best teachers use methods that work and abandon those that don't.

Schools have forgotten a key lesson: the monitorial system failed not because it was wrong, but because it lost sight of education's purpose.

What started as the monitorial school became the monitorial system. It became mechanical, impersonal, and prioritized efficiency over understanding. Sound familiar?

We need teachers and administrators who understand educational history—not to romanticize the past, but to avoid repeating failures while reclaiming wisdom.

Subscribe for next weeks part in the series, where I will attempt to give a survey of the “Simultaneous Method” of teaching…the one we all now and love today.

Recommended Reading

• “The British System of Education”, by Joseph Lancaster (1810)

• Letters on the Free Schools of New England by James G. Carter (1824):

1824 James G

7.25MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• Essays Upon Popular Education by James G. Carter (1826):

1826 James G

2.41MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• Conference Proceedings for the Founding of the American Institute of Instruction (1830):

1830 Founding Of American Institute Of Instruction

16.6MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• Horace Mann’s 7th Annual Report (1844):

1844 Mann 7th Annual Report

9.13MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• Remarks by Boston Public School Teachers on Horace Mann’s 7th Annual Report (1844):

1844 Remarks On The 7th Annual Report

8.03MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• Excellent history.com article about Monitorial Schools.

Third graders in the traditional one-room school houses did not test as well as third graders in the consolidated urban districts with age-based classrooms. But something counterintuitive happened after third grade. Seventh graders in one-room schoolhouses consistently outperformed their larger, more "modern" counterparts. Somehow the students attending the one-room school houses not only learned better, but they learned faster.

The reformers had a problem: the evidence didn't support their agenda. So they ignored it. The results of the study were only discovered sixty years later by Thad Sitton and Milam C Rowold.

The Gilmer-Aikin Laws of 1947 delivered the death blow to Texas's one-room schools, prioritizing administrative efficiency over educational effectiveness. The Gilmer-Aikin Laws are a set of education reforms enacted in Texas in 1949 aimed at reorganizing and improving the state's public education system. The effects of the statute were evident immediately, as 4,500 school districts were consolidated into 2,900 more efficient administrative units. Within a few years, thousands of small rural schools were closed, and their students were bused to consolidated districts that looked more impressive on paper but taught less effectively in practice.

This wasn't unique to Texas. Across America, the one-room schoolhouse was disappearing, not because it failed students, but because it failed to fit the industrial model reformers demanded. We destroyed a system that worked in favor of one that merely looked like it should work.

The Rise and Golden Age of One-Room Schools

The one-room schoolhouse emerged from necessity in America's expanding frontier. As settlers moved west and established small communities, they needed a practical way to educate their children. The solution was elegant in its simplicity: gather all the local children in one room under one teacher.

What began as frontier pragmatism evolved into something remarkable. By the mid-1800s, over 200,000 one-room schools served rural America. These weren't just educational institutions—they were community centers, meeting halls, and symbols of local self-reliance.

The system worked because it had to. Families in rural communities couldn't afford elaborate facilities or multiple teachers. Parents were busy working the fields or tending to young children. They needed maximum educational impact with minimal resources. The constraints forced innovation.

Unlike today's age-segregated classrooms, one-room schools mixed children from roughly ages 5 to 16. Older students naturally mentored younger ones, reinforcing their own learning while developing leadership skills. The system created what we might now call "peer tutoring," except it happened organically rather than as a mandated program.

Teachers in these schools faced challenges that made them extraordinarily resourceful. They had to manage multiple grade levels simultaneously, customize instruction for vastly different ability levels, and serve as principal, counselor, and janitor. The demands of the job attracted only the most capable educators—or drove out the rest quickly.

The curriculum focused on fundamentals: reading, writing, arithmetic, and often practical skills relevant to rural life. Students learned not just academic subjects but responsibility, self-direction, and how to learn independently. The mixed-age environment naturally “differentiated instruction” long before educators coined the term.

How the One-Room School Actually Worked

The practical operation of a one-room school would seem chaotic to modern observers accustomed to rigid grade levels and synchronized instruction. Yet the apparent chaos masked a sophisticated system of “individualized learning.”

The school day typically began early, often with older students arriving first to help prepare materials and tend the wood stove. The teacher would work with different groups throughout the day, delivering brief, targeted lessons to small clusters of students while others worked independently or helped younger classmates.

Students advanced based on mastery rather than age. A gifted eight-year-old might work on advanced mathematics while struggling with reading, receiving instruction at their appropriate level in each subject. There were no artificial barriers preventing acceleration or requiring retention based solely on chronological age. The one-room school served the “gifted and talented” and the “special needs” students equally well.

The physical setup reinforced the educational philosophy. Students sat in rows or around tables, but group composition changed constantly based on subject matter and ability level. The teacher moved throughout the room, providing individual attention and guidance. Student recitations were common, with children standing to demonstrate their learning to the entire school community. Parents would typically attend these recitations — no report cards needed.

Discipline was typically excellent, not because of harsh punishment but because of strong community investment. Parents knew the teacher personally and supported classroom expectations. Older students helped maintain order and served as role models. Misbehavior reflected not just on the individual student but on their entire family within the tight-knit community.

The system also promoted remarkable efficiency. With limited time and resources, every moment had to count. Students learned to use time productively, work independently, and take responsibility for their own learning. These skills served them well beyond the schoolhouse walls, especially since they typically rushed home after school to help with practical tasks on the farm.

Most importantly, the one-room school recognized that learning is not a factory process. While Henry Ford was perfecting the assembly line, rural teachers were demonstrating that education works best when tailored to individual needs rather than mass-produced according to arbitrary timelines.

The Destruction of What Worked

The campaign against one-room schools gained momentum in the early 1900s as education reformers embraced industrial efficiency models. They argued that consolidation would provide better facilities, more specialized teachers, and expanded curriculum options. The logic seemed unassailable: surely larger schools with more resources must be superior to small rural schoolhouses with limited equipment and one overworked teacher.

The 1924 Texas study should have stopped this movement in its tracks. When researchers compared student achievement across different school types, they found that the supposedly primitive one-room schools consistently outperformed their larger, more modern counterparts. Rural students demonstrated superior academic achievement despite—or perhaps because of—their school's limitations.

But the study's findings didn't fit the narrative of progress that reformers had already committed to. Rather than reconsidering their assumptions, they pressed ahead with consolidation plans. The evidence was inconvenient, so they ignored it.

World War II accelerated the destruction of these rural havens. The war effort demanded efficiency and standardization, qualities that seemed incompatible with the individualized approach of one-room schools.

The reformers achieved their goal of efficiency, but at what cost? They created larger, more standardized schools that looked impressive but educated less effectively. They replaced a system based on relationships and individual attention with one focused on administrative convenience and industrial processes.

Lessons from the Rubble

The destruction of America's one-room schools offers a cautionary tale about educational reform. It demonstrates how reformers can mistake efficiency for effectiveness, progress for improvement, and modernization for better outcomes.

The 1924 Texas study revealed something that modern education researchers are rediscovering: small schools with mixed-age groups and individualized instruction often outperform larger, more standardized institutions. The one-room school succeeded because it treated children as individuals rather than products on an assembly line.

Consider what we lost when we closed the one-room schools:

Individualized pacing: Students advanced based on mastery rather than age, allowing both acceleration and remediation as needed.

Peer tutoring: Older students naturally helped younger ones, reinforcing their own learning while developing leadership skills.

Community investment: Parents and neighbors had direct involvement in their local school, creating strong support for learning.

Teacher autonomy: Educators could adapt instruction to the needs of the community and their individual students rather than following scripted curricula.

Efficient resource use: Limited materials forced creative teaching methods and student self-reliance.

Character development: Mixed-age environments and community accountability naturally promoted virtue.

Modern education reformers chase many of these same goals through expensive programs and complex initiatives. We spend billions on differentiated instruction, peer tutoring programs, community engagement efforts, teacher professional development, inclusive learning, and character education curricula.

Yet we had all of these elements working together naturally in the one-room school. We destroyed a system that achieved our current goals more effectively and at far lower cost than our modern alternatives.

Could It Work Today?

The one-room schoolhouse model isn't just historical curiosity—it offers practical solutions to persistent educational problems. Some modern schools have successfully adapted one-room principles: mixed-age classrooms, individualized pacing, student mentoring, and community involvement.

Montessori and Charlotte Mason schools serve as an excellent model. Thriving in many parts of the United States and other countries, these havens of learning are models for the rest of us. Countless students, after leaving a Montessori program, are shocked that anyone would dislike school. Few of them manage to retain their love of learning after spending any amount of time in public school.

Montessori and Charlotte Mason schools consistently demonstrate that children thrive when treated as individuals rather than age-based cohorts. Students advance when ready, receive help when needed, and develop responsibility through meaningful roles in their learning community. The approach works because it aligns with how children actually learn rather than how bureaucrats think they should learn.

The technology that reformers claimed made one-room schools obsolete could actually make them more effective. Online curricula provide content expertise while teachers focus on guidance and mentorship. Communication tools connect students with broader learning communities. Many home schoolers use technology in just this way.

But recreating the one-room school en masse would require abandoning the industrial model that has dominated education for over a century. It would mean trusting teachers rather than micromanaging them. It would require measuring success by individual growth rather than standardized test scores. It would demand community investment rather than bureaucratic control.

Most challenging, it would require admitting that we made a terrible mistake when we destroyed a system that worked in favor of one that merely looks like it should work.

The Road Not Taken

American education took a wrong turn when it embraced industrial efficiency over individual effectiveness. The 1924 Texas study offered clear evidence that one-room schools achieved better results than their larger counterparts, but reformers chose ideology over evidence.

We traded schools that worked for schools that were easier to administer. We replaced teachers who knew every student personally with systems that treat children as data points. We abandoned communities that invested in their local schools for bureaucracies that manage schools as business enterprises.

The one-room schoolhouse wasn't perfect, but it got the fundamentals right: individual attention, high expectations, community support, and learning based on readiness rather than age. These principles remain valid today, even if the specific implementation must adapt to modern circumstances.

Understanding this history matters because we're still making the same mistakes. We still chase efficiency over effectiveness, standardization over personalization, and bureaucratic control over teacher autonomy. We still ignore evidence that contradicts our reform agenda.

The best teachers understand that education is fundamentally about relationships, not systems. They know that children learn best when treated as individuals, not statistics. They recognize that community support matters more than administrative structures.

These teachers work within our flawed system while quietly implementing one-room school principles: they differentiate instruction naturally, encourage peer tutoring, maintain high expectations, and build strong relationships with students and families.

But imagine what they could accomplish if we rebuilt our educational system around the principles that made the one-room school effective rather than the industrial model that replaced it.

We might discover that the road not taken could still lead us home.

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature ; but everything degenerates in the hands of man.

- Emile (1762) by Rousseau

The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was critically important to the historical development of education and to the focus of education as we see it today. In Emile or Treatise on Education (1762), Rousseau explains what education ought to look like given the assumption that man is born and naturally develops in an inherently good way.

Because of original sin, man is born with a fallen human nature. He is pronus ad peccatum, inclined toward sin. Rousseau and other enlightenment philosophers denied this idea. Instead, they argued that man is born good and develops naturally in a good way, but it is an imperfect society that corrupts man. This is one of the three lies of the educational reformers.

1762 Rousseau Emile Or Treatise On Education

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Rousseau’s Three Sources of Education

It may come as a surprise to many that Rousseau addressed this book on the philosophy of education to parents, not teachers or politicians or educational reformers. The reason was simple: at his time, parents were considered responsible for the education of their children. Not even a revolutionary thinker like Rousseau would think to doubt that.

In Book I of Emile, Rousseau says,

It is you whom I address, tender, foresighted mother -- you who know how to stay away from the busy highway and protect the growing seedling from the impact of human opinion! Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies; its fruit will one day be your delight.

He goes on to delineate three kinds or sources of education:

1. Nature

2. Men

3. Things

Education from nature is simply the development of one’s organs and the rest of the body. It happens naturally. Education from men is where we learn to make use of our body. Education from things happens through our personal experience of reality.

These three sources of education must be harmonized in order for one to be properly educated, according to Rousseau. Since education from nature is the only constant, uncontrollable source, the other two sources must be modified to be in accord with nature. Education must be given through “men” and “things” according to the child’s natural state of development.

Rousseau’s Pedagogy

Rousseau was the first to espouse, in its broadest form, a “child-centered” education, so frequently spoken of. The center of the classroom, according to Rousseau, should be the student instead of an authoritarian teacher. In the elementary stage of education (ages five to twelve), Rousseau says the following:

I say, then, that children, not being capable of judgment, have no real memory. They retain sounds, forms, sensations, but rarely ideas, and still more rarely their combinations.

Rousseau concludes that memorization of advanced ideas is futile in these elementary ages, and that education suited to the development of the child will focus on helping him to reason about things he wants to reason about.

Many educational reformers take Rousseau’s ideas as an argument for the expulsion of rote memorization from the classroom. The memory of a child, however, is suited to the retention of sounds, forms, and sensations, and this is an authentic kind of memory. The mind of an educated man is suited to judgements and ideas. Memory is a lower power than judgement, but it is nevertheless a power that ought to be trained in education.

John Dewey was one of the reformers who was most strongly influenced by Rousseau’s Emile. “The Father of Progressive Education”, Dewey was a strong advocate for child-centered learning. He argued that the child should have more of a role to play in how he is educated and even in the content of his education.

The Seeds of a Humanist Religion

Rousseau’s religious views developed over the course of his life: born a Calvinist, he eventually converted to Catholicism, but then reverted to a more natural religion. Natural religion was also at the center of ideas of educational reform. If organized religion is just one of the social structures that corrupt man, it cannot aid him towards harmonization with nature.

Rousseau’s views on religion and free will are at the foundation of the secular humanism that inspired the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, signed and co-authored by John Dewey. Secular humanism was probably the most impactful influence of Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers.

As outlined by the American Humanist Association, “secular humanism” is just one type of humanism, a somewhat outdated one at that. There are many types of humanism, including religious humanism, an outgrowth from Unitarians and Universalists of the 1800s.

Practical Impacts

Although Rousseau’s philosophy of education outlined in Emile is entirely theoretical, his ideas impacted practical reformers from Pestalozzi onwards. Pestalozzi, trained as a minister, dedicated his life to education after reading Emile.

From Johann Pestalozzi to Robert Owen to Horace Mann to John Dewey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an inspiration for much of the educational reform that has given us the system we have today.