Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

attention simultaneously’ whilst the teacher was engaged not in rote learning exercises but in oral lessons and ‘lessons on objects’. Think The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures or Johnny Ball in his heyday rather than Tom Brown’s School Days.
    While Wilderspin and others were trying to prepare the minds of the very young for thinking, those influencing policy on older children were settling on a less ‘child-friendly’ approach: the ‘monitorial method’ 6 developed independently by educationalists Dr Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster. 7 For the latter, the classroom, as described by an Australian educationalist and both an advocate and alumnus of the Lancastrian model, was:
    a parallelogram, the length about twice the width. The windows were to be six feet from the floor. The floor should be inclined, rising one foot in 20 from the master’s desk to the upper end of the room, where the highest class is situated. The master’s desk is on the middle of a platform two to three feet high, erected at the lower end of the room. Forms and desks, fixed firmly to the ground, occupy the middle of the room, a passage being left between the ends of the forms and the wall, five or six feet broad, where the children form semicircles for reading.
    Lancaster was not a fan of corporal punishment it is said; however, misbehaving boys could find themselves tied up in sacks or hoisted above their classmates in cages – something I’m sure I’ve seen in an episode of
The Simpsons
– but this is far from what Wilderspin was advocating at the time.
    Bell’s similar but competing model was also known as the Madras model 8 as it was based on the practices he saw as superintendent of an orphanage for the illegitimate and orphaned sons of officers in India in 1789. Bell’s stated goal in his 1807 book,
An Analysis of the Experiment in Education, Made at Egmore, near Madras
, was ‘to make good scholars, good Men and good Christians’ although the subtitle of the book reveals other more utilitarian aims where he describes a system that is:
    alike fitted to reduce the expense of Tuition, abridge the labour of the Master, and expedite the progress of the Scholar.
    (Bell 1807)
    To this, and remember our lessons from the Industrial Revolution from chapter 17 , he also adds that his proposed system could be:
    a Scheme for the better administration of the Poor-laws, by converting Schools for the lower orders of youth into Schools of Industry.
    (Bell 1807)
    The Madras-type school involved children being arranged into forms or classes where each would find his own academic level and be promoted up or moved down these academic rankings according to achievement. Not only did this mean that ‘no Class is ever retarded in its progress by idle or dull boys’, but also, Bell argued, such a system was more efficient. In the same amount of time it would have taken a teacher to instruct one boy or hear him read a lesson, he could now read to classes of 20 boys or ‘hear them say a lesson, each a portion by rotation’.
    Do you remember reading aloud and around the class when you were at school, the Sword of Damocles working its way from pupil to pupil? Do you still perpetrate it? Does it actually achieve anything? My belief is that, rather than take on board what is being read, those who are about to read are more concerned with when their time will come, those who are reading are more concerned with not stumbling over words and looking foolish in front of their classmates and those who have read are simply too filled with the relief of getting it over with to concentrate on anything at all. But, for Bell, this mythical sword was a great motivator:
    and the Scholar is continually stimulated to obtain pre-eminence in his Class, and even rise above it; and be promoted to a superior; and especially not sink below it, and be degraded to an inferior Class.
    (Bell 1807)
    What both the Bell and the Lancaster models shared was the division of labour between the various layers of authority in any given classroom, with a great deal of instruction being carried out by students who had ‘got it’ to those who hadn’t ‘got it yet’, all under the watchful eyes of a hierarchy of tutors, assistant teachers, teachers, sub-ushers, ushers, school masters, superintendents, trustees and visitors. In this way the Masters can have, in Bell’s stately words, ‘the hundred hands of Briareus, the hundred eyes of Argus, and the wings of Mercury’,