The Simultaneous Method: From Charity to Control
Schools and Schooling: How We Chose Order Over Freedom, Part III
This is the third part of a multi-part series called “Schools and Schooling: How We Chose Order Over Freedom.” To get the whole story, begin with part I “The One-Room Schoolhouse” and part II “The Monitorial School becomes the Monitorial System.”
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.
Melton, James. 2002. Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 187
Check out the Tiffany Hoben’s article on the Cardinal Institute website (her substack: Education Odyssey)