Editing Education reform (section)

===19th century England===
In the 19th century, before the advent of government-funded public schools, [[Protestant]] organizations established [[Charity school|Charity Schools]] to educate the lower social classes. The [[Roman Catholic Church]] and governments later adopted the model.

Designed to be inexpensive, Charity schools operated on minimal budgets and strived to serve as many needy children as possible. This led to the development of [[grammar school]]s, which primarily focused on teaching literacy, grammar, and [[bookkeeping]] skills so that the students could use books as an inexpensive resource to continue their education. ''Grammar'' was the first third of the then-prevalent system of classical education.

Educators [[Joseph Lancaster]] and [[Andrew Bell (educationalist)|Andrew Bell]] developed the [[Monitorial System|monitorial system]], also known as "mutual instruction" or the "Bell–Lancaster method". Their contemporary, educationalist and writer [[Elizabeth Hamilton (writer)|Elizabeth Hamilton]], suggested that in some important aspects the method had been "anticipated" by the [[Belfast]] schoolmaster [[David Manson (schoolmaster)|David Manson]].<ref name=":62">{{Cite book|last=Hamilton|first=Elizabeth|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-j42AQAAMAAJ&q=the+cottagers+of+glenburnie|title=The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer's Ingle-nook|date=1837|publisher=Stirling, Kenney|pages=295–296|language=en}}</ref> In the 1760s Manson had developed a peer-teaching and monitoring system within the context of what he called a "play school" that dispensed with "the discipline of the rod".<ref name=":43">{{cite book|last1=McNeill|first1=Mary|title=The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866|date=1960|publisher=Allen Figgis & Co|location=Dublin|pages=36, 44}}</ref><ref name=":34">{{Cite journal|last=Marshall|first=John J.|date=1908|title=David Manson, Schoolmaster in Belfast|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20608645|journal=Ulster Journal of Archaeology|volume=14|issue=2/3|pages=(59–72) 60–61|jstor=20608645|issn=0082-7355}}</ref> (More radically, Manson proposed the "liberty of each [child] to take the quantity [of lessons] agreeable to his inclination").<ref name=":23">{{Cite journal|last=Drennan|first=William|date=February 1811|title=Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Persons: David Manson|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30073837|journal=The Belfast Monthly|volume=6|pages=126–132|jstor=30073837|via=}}</ref>

Lancaster, an impoverished [[Religious Society of Friends|Quaker]] during the early 19th century in London and Bell at the [[Madras School|Madras School of India]] developed this model independent of one another. However, by design, their model utilizes more advanced students as a resource to teach the less advanced students; achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 1:2 and educating more than 1000 students per adult. The lack of adult supervision at the Lancaster school resulted in the older children acting as disciplinary monitors and taskmasters.

To provide order and promote discipline the school implemented a unique internal economic system, inventing a currency called a ''Scrip.''  Although the currency was worthless in the outside world, it was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student's tuition and student's could use scrip to buy food, school supplies, books, and other items from the school store. Students could earn scrip through tutoring. To promote discipline, the school adopted a work-study model. Every job of the school was bid-for by students, with the largest bid winning. However, any student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes to earn scrip. The bids for student jobs paid for the adult supervision.[[File:Joseph Lancaster by John Hazlitt.jpg|thumb|190px|Joseph Lancaster]]
Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world. Lancaster schools provided a grammar-school education with fully developed internal economies for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. To reduce cost and motivated to save up scrip, Lancaster students rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library instead of purchasing the textbook. Student's would read aloud their pages to groups. Students commonly exchanged tutoring and paid for items and services with receipts from ''down tutoring''.{{citation needed|date=May 2021}}

The schools did not teach submission to orthodox Christian beliefs or government authorities. As a result, most English-speaking countries developed mandatory publicly paid education explicitly to keep public education in "responsible" hands. These elites said that Lancaster schools might become dishonest, provide poor education, and were not accountable to established authorities. Lancaster's supporters responded that any child could cheat given the opportunity, and that the government was not paying for the education and thus deserved no say in their composition.

Though motivated by charity, Lancaster claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the most impoverished street children. Ironically, Lancaster lived on the charity of friends in his later life.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/subcategory/education-reform|title=Education Reform|website=www.publicschoolreview.com}}</ref>