Sarah Trimmer - Literary Career - Bell Vs. Lancasterian School System Debate

Bell Vs. Lancasterian School System Debate

In 1789, Andrew Bell invented the Madras system of education to order to instruct British colonial subjects in India; it was a disciplinary system which employed a hierarchy of student monitors and very few teachers (economical for the colonies, Bell argued). He published a book, Experiment in Education (1797), in order to explain his system, one that he thought could be adapted for the poor in England (in it he endorsed many of Trimmer's own books). A year after reading the Experiment, an English Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, adopted many of its principles for his school in London and then published his own book, Improvements in Education (1803), which repeated many of Bell's ideas. Because of his Quaker sympathies, Lancaster did not encourage the teaching of the doctrines of the Established Church. Trimmer, appalled by the suggestion that British children did not need to be brought up within the Established Church, wrote and published her Comparative View of the two systems in 1805, creating a schism between two very similar systems. According to F. J. Harvey Darton, an early scholar of children's literature, “her effect upon English education… was very considerable, even extraordinary. The two rival systems, Bell’s and Lancaster’s, were hotly debated all over the country, and the war between Bell and the Dragon, as a cartoonist labelled it, raged in all the magazines, even in the Edinburgh Review." Out of the debate “arose the two great societies – the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Children of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, and the British and Foreign School Society – upon whose work, fundamentally, the whole of later elementary school system was based".