Bell, ANDREW, D.D.

Bell, ANDREW, D.D., founder of the 'Madras System of Education,' was born at St Andrews, 27th March 1753, and educated at the university of that place. After acting as a tutor in Virginia (1774-81), he took orders in the Church of England, sailed for India in 1787, and within two years was appointed to eight army chaplainships, all of which he managed to hold simultaneously. In 1789 he became superintendent of the Madras Orphanage for the sons of soldiers. Finding it impossible to obtain the services of properly qualified masters, he at length resorted to the expedient of conducting the school by the aid of the scholars themselves. Hence originated the far-famed 'Monitorial System' (q.v.). The state of his health forced him to return to England, where, in 1797, he was pensioned by the East India Company. His pamphlet entitled An Experiment in Education, made at the Male Asylum of Madras (1797), attracted little attention, until Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838), a Quaker, commenced to work upon the system, and succeeded in obtaining for it a large measure of public recognition. In 1803 Lancaster also published a tractate on education, recommending the monitorial system, as it was now called, and admitting Bell to be the original inventor of it, an admission which he afterwards discredibly retracted. Lancasterian schools now began to spread over the country. The church grew alarmed, and in 1811 founded the 'National Society for the Education of the Poor,' of which Bell was appointed superintendent, the number of its schools soon increasing to 12,000. He made a journey to the Continent in 1816 to spread his ideas, when he met Pestalozzi. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who all had faith in the system, encouraged Bell; but it was found that although powerful service had been rendered to education by its aid, many evils, such as ignorance and inefficiency on the part of teachers, had also resulted from the system. Rector of Swanage till 1809, Bell then was made master of Sherburn Hospital, Durham, and in 1818-19 a prebendary of Hereford and of Westminster. He died at Cheltenham, 27th January 1832. He left (besides a valuable estate) £120,000 for the purpose of founding educational institutions. Half of this was to go to St Andrews, the other half to be equally divided between Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leith, Aberdeen, Inverness, Cupar, and the Royal Naval School, London. See his Life by Southey (3 vols. 1844), and Meiklejohn's An Old Educational Reformer (1881).