Joshua Girling Fitch

“ Moreover, the little monitors were often found to make up in brightness, tractability and energy for their lack of experience, and to teach the arts of reading, writing and computing with surprising success. And one cardinal principle of Bell and Lancaster is of prime importance. They regarded a school, not merely as a place to which individual pupils should come for guidance from teachers, but as an organized community whose members have much to learn from each other. ”

“ But the inherent intellectual defects of an educational system dependent wholly on ignorant and immature agents, though not visible at first, revealed themselves before many years; and in 1846 the newly constituted education department took the important step of superseding monitors by pupil-teachers, all of whom were required before apprenticeship to pass through the elementary course, and afterwards to receive regular instruction and to be trained for the office of teacher. The pupil-teacher system itself has now been to a large extent displaced by the employment of adult teachers. ”

“ It is very touching to see in his latest diaries and letters the picture of a broken-hearted and disappointed man, welcoming, nevertheless, such faint rays of hope as came occasionally to relieve the gloom of his solitude, and never wholly losing confidence in the mission with which he believed himself to have been divinely entrusted. ”

“ He gave valuable evidence before the Schools Inquiry Commission of Lord Taunton in 1866, but it was very characteristic of him that he dreaded the! intrusion of public authority, whether that of royal commissioners or of the legislature, into the domain of the school, wherein he thought it indispensable that the liberty and personal inventiveness and enthusiasm of teachers should have full scope and be hindered by no official regulations. ”

“ We have since come to believe that intelligent teaching requires skill and previous training, and that even the humblest rudiments are not to be well taught by those who have only just acquired them for themselves, or to be attained by mere mechanical drill. ”

“ There can be little doubt that the sense of comradeship and corporate life was unusually strong in the old monitorial schools, and that it was scarcely inferior to that of the best public schools of our own time. ”

“ Here he took remarkable interest in the elementary school of the parish, and ever afterwards attributed much of his professional success and his insight into educational principles and methods to the experience he had acquired in imparting the humble rudiments of learning to the children of the poor. After an interval of two or three years, spent partly in private tuition and partly as curate at Cookham Dean, he married in 1853 a daughter of Carl Koch, commissioner of customs at Bonn, and was elected to the mastership of Uppingham School, a post which he retained until his death in 1887. ”

“ The number of pupils grew rapidly. His school was divided into small classes, each under the care of a monitor; a group of these classes was superintended by a head monitor; and the quasi-military system of discipline, and of gradation of ranks, caused the whole establishment to assume an orderly, animated, and very striking appearance. The attention of the Duke of Bedford and of Lord Somerville was directed to his efforts, and soon afterwards the Duke of Sussex and other members of the royal family visited his institution and encouraged him with support. ”

“ Bell’s educational aims were humbler, as he feared to “elevate above their station those who were doomed to the drudgery of daily labour,” and therefore did not desire to teach even writing and ciphering to the lower classes. ”

“ He took the first step in 1869 in the formation of the Head Masters’ Conference, an institution which has ever since done much to suggest improvements in method and to cultivate a sense of corporate life and mutual helpfulness among the teachers in the great schools. ”

“ The pamphlet is a petulant attack on all his former friends, whom he describes as having ‘choused him out of the management of his own institution.’ He had suffered severely from disappointment, ill-health, and poverty. He had more than once been imprisoned for debt, his troubles were aggravated by the mental affliction which befell his wife, and in 1818 he determined to shake the dust from his feet and try the New World. ”

“ At the age of twenty he began to gather a few poor children under his father’s roof, and to give them the rudiments of instruction, without a fee, except in cases in which the parent was willing to pay a trifle. ”

“ In 1810 Lancaster had published his second pamphlet, ‘Report of Joseph Lancaster's Progress from 1798.’ In this report he speaks gratefully of the assistance of his friends and of the pecuniary sacrifices they had made on behalf of his system; and, summarising his own work for the past year, he records that he had travelled 3,775 miles, delivered sixty-seven lectures in the presence of 23,480 hearers, promoted the establishment of fifty new schools for 14,200 scholars, and had raised 3,850l. in aid of the society's work. ”

“ The public interest thus excited in Lancaster's system, the patronage of the royal family, and the announcement of a long list of influential supporters, combined to induce the friends of church education to show increased hostility. It was resolved to adopt Bell's name and system, and to establish a number of elementary schools, which should be taught by monitors, but in which the management and the instruction should be distinctly identified with the established church. The National Society was founded in 1811 to carry out these principles. ”

“ In 1801 he took a large room in the Borough Road, and inscribed over it, ‘All who will may send their children and have them educated freely, and those who do not wish to have education for nothing may pay for it if they please.’ His inability to pay assistants forced him to devise the plan of employing the elder scholars to teach the younger. ”

“ Thoughts on Life Science (1869) , written under the assumed name of Benjamin Place; Education and School (1864) ; The Theory and Practice of Teaching (1883) ; Uppingham School Sermons (1858) ; The Child’s Grammar (1852) ; The Principles of Grammar (1868) ; Exercises in Grammatical Analysis (1868) ; School Songs (1858) ”