On the development of teaching as a system of social interaction. A comparative history of the reception of the monitorial system of education in Spain and Germany (1808-1868).

The project analyses different paths of reception of the monitorial system of education a very popular system of teaching in Spain and selected German states during the first decades of the 19th century. The monitorial system intended the teaching of big and heterogeneous groups of pupils by combining two different techniques. On one hand, it classified pupils along clear definitions of achievement levels and planned tightly the use of time and space in the classrooms. On the other, it foresaw the systematic collaboration of better pupils as teachers of the small classes. These monitors , as they were called, were often responsibly for direct teaching and for many tasks in ordering the classroom. The monitorial system of education, mostly an English invention, became very popular in the whole world as a sign of rationality and modernity in schooling. Its spread coincided with the formation and differentiation of a specific social subsystem of education, which took place in many European and North American countries. In this sense, a early process of system-building coined the celebrity of German schools in this time, whereas this followed in the European periphery, here represented by Spain, later and under different conditions. The comparative perspective on regional , or national paths of reception, interpretation and reformulation of this successful model of schooling aims at the analysis of different paths in the emerging of educational systems at the basic level of teaching techniques. This work on the response of local traditions faced to universal models is a contribution to a wider analysis of both culturally specified social technologies of schooling as well as processes of schooling and teaching reform.