Joseph Lancaster spoke about his system of education at the Assembly Rooms, South Mall, Cork, Ireland, 209 years ago today, on 30 January 1812.

Joseph Lancaster, the English educator, was born the 10th child of a working class family in South London in 1778. He rejected his parents' plans for a ministerial career but brought a religious zeal to his education of the poor, the calling he chose shortly after becoming a Quaker. He developed a system of monitorial tuition whereby older boys taught the younger pupils the basic subjects. Lancaster’s teaching career began in 1793, when he asked his father’s permission to bring some poor children home in order to teach them to read.

Crowds of children came to him; since he couldn’t afford to hire extra teachers or assistants, he had the idea of making those pupils who knew a little more teach the others, and he devised a workable system to this effect. His school, his lectures, and his pamphlet Improvements in Education as It Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community (1803) attracted the attention of philanthropically minded people, and he felt encouraged to expand the school and to found others. Today we take education for granted, but in Joseph's day things were very different. Here are just a few of the things that Lancaster believed:

• All children have potential which can be released through education
• Children should be rewarded and motivated in school, not beaten
• School should be free
• Children should be provided with food in school
• Teachers should be properly trained, paid and respected

Many people disagreed with him and he faced much opposition, but through the force of his vision and energy, he changed the world and became known as The Poor Child's Friend.'

Lancaster designed a specific way of teaching large numbers of children. It was called the Monitorial System. Monitors were the brightest children from each 'year group', who would be trained by the teacher to deliver simple lessons to their peers. In this way one teacher could school hundreds of children in one room.

But Lancaster proved to be vain, rash, and extravagant and soon fell heavily into debt. Friends of the school paid his creditors, became trustees of the school, and organized the Royal Lancasterian Institution, later known as the British and Foreign School Society (1810). Lancaster’s techniques for mass teaching spread rapidly, and there were soon about 30,000 pupils being taught in 95 Lancasterian schools.

Meanwhile, Lancaster severed his connections with his original school and opened a new secondary-level boarding school, which soon ended in bankruptcy. Thriftless, impulsive, and undisciplined, Lancaster had allowed his school to flounder financially in 1808. A group of Quaker supporters paid his debts, rescued the school, and established the Royal Lancasterian Society in 1811 as a trust for its funds. Lancaster was grateful originally but soon began to chafe at the generosity and efficiency of his new trustees.

In 1818 he emigrated to the United States, where his work had already sparked public education movements in Albany, N.Y., Boston, and Philadelphia, among other major U.S. cities. Nothing, however, came of Lancaster’s own projects in the United States, and so he welcomed an invitation from Simon Bolivar to move to Venezuela in 1825. He quarreled with the Latin-American leader and returned north in 1827, spending the last decade of his life before his death in 1838 in Canada and the United States making various experiments with his system.

Joseph Lancaster visited Ireland in December 1811, and was invited to lecture in Cork in January 1812.

There was a great need at the time to provide for the education of the destitute boys of the city, as Nano Nagle and the Presentation Order were already doing for the girls. The Catholic Bishop, acting through the Cork Charitable Society, had already arranged for the introduction of the fledg-ling Christian Brothers Order, who were to establish a school in the north side of the city.

However, inspired by the ideas of Joseph Lancaster, a group of philan-thropic gentlemen arranged for the establishment of a "Lancasterian" school. A site was procured from the Cork Charitable Society on Hammond's Marsh in the western suburbs and plans were drawn up to build a school to cater for 1,000 pupils. The foundation stone was laid on 4 May 1812, and construction continued until October when the walls and roof had been erected. Work was then suspended for two years.

The delay was due to an issue of religion, in this particular case, the absence of religious teaching. The promoters of the project visualised it as a non-sectarian school, a concept which led to opposition from the church-es. Eventually the administration of the Lancasterian School was taken over by the Cork Charitable Society.

Joseph Lancaster enunciated the principles of the Lancasterian system of education in the Assembly Rooms, South Mall, on 30 January 1812.

Further reading on Joseph Lancaster: William Corston, A Brief Sketch of the Life of Joseph Lancaster (1840), is the only biography of Lancaster. Mary Sturt, The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (1967), has a good discussion of him. The educational context in which Lancaster worked is described in John W. Adamson, English Education, 1789-1902 (1930).