Music Instruction in Early Nineteenth-Century American Monitorial Schools
The monitorial school, developed in England in the late eighteenth century by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, was adopted in the early nineteenth-century in American schools. Educators hoped that this system, which was designed to extend the teacher's efforts by means of student assistant teachers, would provide training for children at minimal expense—up to three hundred pupils per teacher. The first three volumes of the American Journal of Education (1826–1828) were devoted almost entirely to discussions of the monitorial system and to schools that used it. Ezra Barrett's Sabbath School Psalmody was planned and published in 1828 to assist teachers in presenting music rudiments by means of this system. The most significant characteristic of the system was that the assistant teachers, or monitors, learned given lessons and then instructed other members of the class by means of prepared questions and answers. The monitors and their groups repeatedly recited the questions and answers until the information was assimilated. Henry Kemble Oliver, a teacher, church musician, and hymn-tune composer who taught in monitorial schools during the 1820s, related his observations of the monitorial system before the first annual meeting of the American Institute of Instruction in 1830. He first spoke well of the system, principally because a large number of pupils could be accommodated by a single teacher, saving time and money. However, Oliver also pointed out the superficiality of the instruction and other adverse effects that outweighed the advantages. The influence of monitorial schools declined in America during the first half of the nineteenth century with the development of public schools.