The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades following 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning.…

The monitorial system of education was the most promising device in the field of primary education at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its astonishing spread across the five continents represents one of the earliest processes of internationalization in the field of elementary schooling, which has rarely been analysed from the point of view…