The "monitorial school" was perhaps the most dramatic pedagogic reform of the epoch. Teaching with the help of student monitors was developed simultaneously by Bell and by Lancaster in England, and quickly applied in France and elsewhere on the Continent, and in North America as well. This method shared with the Brothers of the Christian Schools on insistence on simultaneous instruction and the replacement of spoken commands with rigidly defined signals that regimented the children in the class throughout their school day. Its two most innovative aspects were, first, the use of pupil-monitors to teach what they had been taught to their less advanced peers; second, the simultaneous teaching of reading and writing to even the youngest pupils.

The monitorial school movement in Britain had its heyday in the first three decades of the nineteenth century; that is, prior to the intervention of the state in schooling there. In France, the methode mutuelle provided anticlerical proponents of popular education with a feasible alternative to the poor schooling provided by the religious orders. Generally advocated by progressive factions of the middle classes, most often in urban industrial centers, the method clearly appealed to them by virtue of its ability to provide inexpensive and orderly instruction.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 76 - 77)