Joseph Lancaster: Educationalist

In the early nineteenth-century, Lancaster's theories of education were popular, and widely imitated. He believed pupils that performed well should be given rewards, to incentivise them to continue to excel and others to imitate them. And he believed that pupils who did badly or transgressed the rules should be punished, for instance by being beaten. But a simple flogging was not the only approach he recommended to teachers. Humiliation and ridicule, he noted, were often far more effective disincentives.

An example: for some reason Lancaster had a peculiar dislike of boys using a sing-song voice when they read aloud in class. Below is his suggestion as how to counter this monstrous delinquency: it's a little perfect storm of emotional sadism and pettiness, with a little random anti-Semitism thrown in.

[This is from Lancaster Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes (1803), 89]