There have always been instructions on learning among people before the social role of the teacher with its bundle of expectations and different assessments of status on the basis of social development developed in a clear way. In the following historical excursion my interest will be aspects of teaching-learning communication of peers that point to hardly noticed implications. At first glance objective-organizational measures seem to be implicated with the process of social control that has crystallized in history and culture - a process that cannot always be reconstructed according to the Foucaultian scheme. After general compulsory education had been introduced it was the duty of older students to teach the younger ones in the Saxon schools for princes. Historical precursors can be found both in the traditions of cultures outside of Europe (e.g., among the Hindus) as well as in old European civilization. (In M.F. Quintilianus and later in Comenius). In our specific context I would like to recall the long forgotten names of Bell and Lancaster who in 1797 and in 1806 elaborated the method named after them in their own publications. School children taught their peers under the supervision of a teacher. The success of this method in the schools for poor and factory workers' children in the East Indian colonies and in England worked to the benefit of the expanding economic system and its inherent tendency to invest as little as possible in the educational system. Nonetheless, an explanation seeing the genuine need of society to have people with better education as resulting from the economic calculations of the bearers of power positions would be to simplistic. Ideological interests also varied according to the historical and cultural situation. This was reflected historically in the different reception of the "pupil-teacher" method in England and Austria. In England institutions for training teachers were established, while in Austria the diffusion of the Bell-Lancaster method was associated with the promotion of a political tendency that could not be reconciled with the restorative spirit of the Vormarz. We can assume that the reason for this is not so much the specific cultural unease felt by the central power when groups can work in the shadow of the system of social control. Obviously, the insight of social research that peer groups sometimes represent values and attitudes that are irreconcilable with the goals of the organization belongs to the lifeworld repertoire of domination knowledge in all societies with a complex organization. However, there seem to be differences in the cultural interpretations of the dangers, costs, advantages and interests so that a different view of the intensity of social control was resulted. This clearly reflects the difference between England and Austria. As early as 1808, Natorp published a German- language version: "Lancaster einziger Schulmeister unter tausend Kindern" (Lancaster the only.....) Here the above-mentioned idea of "reciprocal education" was propagated, as the education of collaborators from the circle of school children was called. In 1820 and in 1837 this method was banned in the political school constitution of the Austrian monarchy- in comparion to Maria Theresia's school order that had preceded it by thirty years this was shamefully reactionary. We can thus conclude that teachers felt a nagging need to use this method even if the concept of "reciprocal eduction" cannot be described as harmoniously fitting the given social and political situation. It was a natural response to the organizational challenges and not an attempt call into question or tear down structures. A normative analysis of the Bell-Lancaster method shows that on an international level normas and values of society as a whole could be reproduced on a small scale. For the English context his promised sufficiently high stability even if even there the Anglicans mounted resistance against this method (cf. Foucault's intepretation in Surveiller et Punir). It seems all the more paradox and less clear why the model was banned in Austria, if one fails to take into account the cultural context when dealing with the self-dynamic of groups as sketched above. For the purposes of discipline and the social control of the highly reglemented institution of the school, suspicion was elicited by the potentially anti-hierarchical aspect that is characteristic of every social network of human relations with no or only little status differentiation and that evolves when groups of people as "objects" of institutional measures have the possibility to enter into the process of common understanding and action. While theoretical frameworks of modern learning psychology (e.g. those of Piaget, Vygotsky and Sternberg) have contributed to the understanding of the success of peer and cross-age tutoring, they have failed to take into account the culturally differentiated historical background.