Joseph Lancaster (25 November 1778 – 23 October 1838) was an English Quaker and public education innovator. He developed, and propagated on the grounds both of economy and efficacy, a monitorial system of primary education. In the first decades of the 19th century his ideas found application in new schools established in growing industrial centres. Early life He was born in Southwark, south London, on 25 November 1778, into a large family, the son of Richard Lancaster who had been a soldier and made cane sieves, and his wife Sarah Faulkes who was a shopkeeper. He was interested as a teenager in missionary work in Jamaica. He is said to have run away from home, and to have been returned through naval connections of the minister Thomas Urwick. Lancaster joined the Society of Friends, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Schoolmaster In 1798, Lancaster founded a free elementary school, with support from his father. He went on in 1801 to start in Borough Road, Southwark a free school using a variant of the monitorial system. Lancaster's ideas were developed simultaneously with those of Andrew Bell in Madras whose system was referred to as the "Madras system of education". Without wishing to "detract from he praise so justly due" to Lancaster, Elizabeth Hamilton noted they had been also "anticipated" some forty years before by the Belfast schoolmaster David Manson (1718-1792). The method of instruction and delivery is recursive. As one student learns the material he or she is rewarded for successfully passing on that information to the next pupil. This method is now commonly known as peer tutoring. The use of monitors was prompted partly by a need to avoid the cost of assistant teachers. Lancaster wrote Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community in 1803. It brought him positive publicity, and the Borough Road school numerous visitors. Support The Borough Road school called itself the Royal Free School, and Lancaster was granted an audience with George III in 1805, at Weymouth. This apogee of recognition built on the support of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, and involved two royal dukes, Kent and Strathearn and Sussex. Lancaster's supporters have been defined as "influential Nonconformists, utilitarian liberals and radicals." They included Edward Wakefield and James Mill. In his education book Chrestomathia (1816), Jeremy Bentham supported a version of the monitorial system, for which he gave