Mr. Lancaster’s System: The Failed Reform That Created America’s Public Schools by Adam Laats. Johns Hopkins University Press, 264 pages. 2024.
Linda McMahon will “empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Donald Trump recently effused about his nominee for secretary of education. Although Trump himself has promised to dismantle the Department of Education, not much is known about the education positions of McMahon, whose claim to fame is having presided over the WWE—World Wrestling Entertainment. Yet within the contours of the emerging Trump administration a clear vision for the nation’s schools is emerging, and it looks a lot like the past.
It’s more than nostalgia at work on the far right, though. The prevailing ideology is that schools need more than reform—they need a wholesale “uprooting.” Oddly, it’s Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has spelled out that strategy, not McMahon. In a 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth and coauthor David Goodwin claim that the education system went off the rails not with pandemic school closures or with in-school gender reassignment surgeries, but more than a century ago, when progressives saw public schools as a means for “political control.” The emergence of taxpayer-funded schools that kids were required to attend meant that “state and local governments took on the role of schoolmaster, supplanting the church, the parents, and even the influence of the local community,” say Hegseth and Goodwin. “In our schools today, Americans have become weak-spirited citizens who serve only the state.” The solution, they write, is to return to “classical Christian education.”
So if the remedy for all that ails our schools can be found in the era before the progressive movement, what did that world look like? That’s the question that historian Adam Laats sets out to answer in his fascinating and timely new book, Mr. Lancaster’s System: The Failed Reform That Created America’s Public Schools. Alas, it was not quite the Eden imagined by the religious right or depicted in Hegseth and Goodwin’s rendering, in which children received a Christian education, “gain[ing] wisdom by studying history and the classics.” In Laats’s account, the pre-public education era was chaotic, inadequate, and expensive. Parents who could afford tutoring or private schools paid for these themselves; those with few resources sent their kids either to “pauper schools” or off to work. “Children were often workers first and learners second,” wrote Laats in Slate. In Trumpian parlance, “the next Generation of American Students and Workers” was either/or, not both/and.
Travel back two hundred years and the tabloid newspapers of the day were as full of lurid crime tales as today’s New York Post. Stories of kids-gone-bad held a particular queasy fascination for the public. In one high-profile case, members of a New York City street gang known as the Spring Street Fencibles refused to step aside to allow a carriage transporting prominent businessmen to pass. As Laats recounts, the young drunken rowdies “blew cigar smoke in the gentlemen’s faces, called them dandies, and tried to trip them.” Menace became blows, and one of the carriage occupants would end up dying as a result of a Fencible punch to the stomach.
The message, delivered again and again in the press, was that American cities were overrun by “wild packs of near-feral children.” Urban reformers seized on the rising panic to broadcast their own dire warning: get these kids into school, or else. Young children, they warned, were getting an education—but it was from the streets and the wharves, producing a generation of young criminals all too adept “in the arts of begging, skillful in petty thefts, and familiar with obscene and profane language.” They were, in the words of today’s school reformers, “career ready,” but for lives of crime.
What to do? These street children were going without basic education in literacy and “morals” because in the private system of the time the burden of paying for teachers fell largely onto parents themselves, an obligation most could not afford. And yet as the nineteenth-century urban elites understood, providing teachers for all of these poor youngsters would cost a fortune.
The problems that so vexed nineteenth-century reformers—urban poverty, children on the streets, youth violence—suddenly seemed solvable, without significant investment of capital or a broad political transformation.
The “Mr. Lancaster” in the book’s title refers to one Joseph Lancaster, the original education reform huckster, who won over early nineteenth-century elites with his slick sales pitch to educate American youngsters on the cheap. Lancaster had a brash “I alone can fix the schools” energy, and his vision of schooling was appealingly straightforward. Instead of paying the expensive salaries of teachers, his schools essentially let the kids teach other kids for free. Monitors, students who were barely older than their young charges, were tasked with passing along the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Forget small classrooms or the individual teachers that the wealthy had long relied upon to instruct their children in history, Greek, Latin, and the arts. Mr. Lancaster’s system envisioned vast, factory-sized spaces in which the “thronging hordes” of young people who threatened urban order could be batch-processed into literate, moral citizens.
Had the wealthy patrons who rushed to embrace Lancaster’s vision of a modern, “scientific” approach to schooling delved into his track record back in his native England, they might have been less enthusiastic. But the governor of New York and other state and city leaders had no idea that Lancaster had been banned from the London school he’d founded and was on the run from the creditors, the King of England among them, who’d been underwriting his tastes for champagne and expensive carriage rides. The elites who squired him aboard a luxury cruise up the Hudson River to Albany in 1818 only knew that this self-declared “Patron of Education and Friend of the Poor” brought with him a miracle cure for the new country’s social ills.
Lancaster’s sales pitch was irresistible to local power brokers. Here was an opportunity to teach urban urchins not just basic literacy and numeracy but “habits of attention, order and obedience,” as Philadelphia philanthropist Roberts Vaux put it. Vaux, a prominent reformer and member of the local Quaker elite, thrilled to the idea that the vast new factory schools would produce young Christians. Other boosters saw Lancaster’s system as a way to churn out citizens of the new nation with the “correct national feeling and character.”
The miracle part of the miracle cure was its cost. Because the system relied upon the free labor of children, cities would be able to offer basic education to every child. The problems that so vexed nineteenth-century reformers—urban poverty, children on the streets, youth violence—suddenly seemed solvable. And not only did it require no significant investment of capital, no political transformation was necessary. Young city dwellers could be transformed from their near-feral state to civic obedience without city leaders having to change a thing.
It was all an illusion, of course. As Lancaster’s followers quickly discovered, no matter how compelling the sales pitch sounded on paper, setting up and running a school cost money, even with children doing the bulk of the teaching labor. And the perfect system of his manuals, in which every student and teacher had an assigned role, all working and learning together according to precise, down-to-the-minute instructions, disguised a darker reality. Back in England, Lancaster had regularly beaten and sexually assaulted his young monitors.
Meanwhile, harsh discipline, bordering on abuse, was the secret sauce of the growing network of American schools Lancaster inspired. Male students who showed up to school dirty might be washed by a female student before the entire classroom. Serial misbehavers were forced to wear their offenses listed on a “fool’s coat” over their clothes, or worse, they might be suspended above the classroom in a cage or a sack while their classmates down below hurled abuse at them. Even minor offenses, like wandering around the classroom, merited harsh punishment, such as shackling, a punishment that black parents whose children attended one of a handful of segregated Lancasterian schools found particularly humiliating.
It was the refusal of the children to submit to such abuse that would ultimately usher in the implosion of the country’s first school reform experiment. In one city after another, they voted with their feet, refusing to participate in Lancaster’s educational miracle. By the mid-1820s the experiment was over. In 1838 Joseph Lancaster reached his ignominious end: he was crushed beneath the wheels of a horse-drawn carriage in the streets of New York City. By that time the glow was long gone, the debts and abuse allegations finally catching up with him.
Laats, the author of five previous books, including the excellent Fundamentalist U, is out to solve something of a mystery in the origin story of American public education. How is it that the nation’s first—and epically disastrous—experiment in education reform somehow set the stage for the democratically governed, taxpayer-funded school systems that remain with us to this day? Laats makes a convincing case that much of the credit belongs to the kids, who may not have been interested in, say, spending their day suspended above the classroom in cages, but very much did want to go to school. They and their parents pushed for precisely the kind of education that urban elites had tried so hard to avoid having to provide, not to mention pay for.
It turns out that the only thing more American than falling for a slick sales pitch is the historical amnesia that consigns each previous romance to the memory hole.
Mr. Lancaster’s System is also a love story, chronicling the American obsession with getting something for nothing, or at least for less. Since the earliest days of public schools, there have been charlatans peddling quick fixes, promising to teach poor children for cheap, curing the nation’s poverty. “In every generation—going all the way back to the very first years of the United States—school reformers have trumpeted their errors, their flawed schemes, and their impossible notions as marvelous new discoveries, new possibilities of a new modern world,” writes Laats. “Our generation is no exception.” Alas, it turns out that the only thing more American than falling for a slick sales pitch is the historical amnesia that consigns each previous romance to the memory hole.
What is remarkable is how little the schemes have changed over the entire sweep of U.S. education history. Lancaster’s dream of factory schools with “one great assembly of a thousand children,” as a supporter put it, pops up repeatedly across the decades, as when New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams claimed in 2021 that new technology had made traditional classrooms obsolete. One teacher could teach three hundred to four hundred students at a time, Adams insisted. Today’s enthusiastic peddlers of artificial intelligence, seem to believe the shiny new technology has solved the “2 sigma problem” identified by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom forty years ago—that individually tutored students learn more than those in a classroom. They are again offering a quick fix to the problem that consumed urban elites of the 1800s: providing students with individual instruction is prohibitively expensive. Even Lancaster’s gimmicky use of time-saving devices to maximize efficiency has shown up again and again. The no-excuses charter schools that were a hallmark of the Obama era of education reform, for example, prided themselves on timing every student movement down to the second so as not to miss a single moment of instruction.
It would take decades after Lancaster’s death for the United States to mint its first billionaire. Today the Forbes inventory of the richest Americans is studded with self-proclaimed school fixers, united in the conviction that their business success uniquely equips them to revolutionize public schooling. Their ranks include Bill Gates (make schools smaller, get tougher on teachers), Mark Zuckerberg (plug the kids into education technology so as to “personalize” their learning), and John Walton (subject public schools to Walmart-style competition).
Then there are the growing ranks of the plutocrats—such as Charles Koch and the DeVos family—who have set their sights on getting rid of public education altogether, convinced that public schools produce too many young leftists, that market alternatives are always better, and that religious education is the best of all. While Betsy DeVos et al. pitch their crusade against “government schools” as fresh and innovative–school vouchers, those musty relics of Southern efforts to get around school integration have been rebranded as education savings accounts—the privatized future they’re peddling looks like what Americans rejected in the 1800s. “We don’t need to wonder whether DeVos’ miracle cure might work because the history is starkly clear,” writes Laats, “it already didn’t work.”
What Laats describes as an “unwarranted self-assurance” unites today’s supremely confident billionaires with the elites of yesteryear who rallied around Joseph Lancaster. Of course, the unfathomable riches possessed by today’s school fixers endows them with a power to reshape the entire policy and political landscape that is without historical precedent. According to one recent investigation, the school choice organization founded by Betsy DeVos has spent more than $250 million over the last thirteen years to advance school privatization across the country. Jeffrey Yass, the billionaire businessman turned GOP megadonor, gave generously to Republican candidates and causes in 2023 and 2024, including $6 million to Texas governor Greg Abbott in the service of advancing his pet causes: school vouchers and cutting taxes. He chipped in another $5 million to try to convince Kentuckians to amend their constitution to allow public funds to go to private schools. And when South Carolina’s highest court ruled that that state’s school voucher program was unconstitutional, Yass stepped in and announced he’d pay the cost of students’ tuition for the rest of the semester himself, a move squarely out of the early American tradition of “paternalistic voluntarism.”
That Kentucky ballot question, by the way, went down in flames, as did a similar measure in Nebraska. In a state where nearly 65 percent of the voters went for Trump, the same percentage of Kentucky voters said no to Yass’s education vision, cementing a trend in which the public rejects school vouchers every single time they have the opportunity to vote on them. But the will of the public is little match for plutocratic certainty—and the media’s credulous treatment of their “expertise.” A recent profile of Yass put it this way: “Convinced that a free-market school system is the solution to Philly’s—and the country’s—big problems, the incredibly wealthy, notoriously secretive suburban businessman is bankrolling an initiative to change the way we teach children here and across the nation. Could he be right?”
Laat’s history provides a definitive answer to this question: no. Even as today’s advocates for “classical Christian education” extol the importance of history, they don’t seem have any historical knowledge. That our public schools came to exist precisely because of the failure of their vision matters not at all. What matters is that Yass, DeVos, Hegseth, and Trump—and perhaps Linda McMahon—are utterly convinced that their schemes will finally eliminate not just adequately funded public school systems, but the need for the taxes that pay for them. We are indeed speeding back toward an education world closer to olden times. It will not be pretty.