The National Council of Educational Research and Training is in the news again over the revision of the secondary school history syllabus. While the debate goes on over history and its (mis)-representation, here’s a genuine nugget from the 19th and 20th centuries that led to a radical change in how classrooms across the country are administered to this day.
Remember class monitors in school? Those peers who were assigned special responsibilities, like ensuring the classroom doesn’t make ‘noise’, or that
The National Council of Educational Research and Training is in the news again over the revision of the secondary school history syllabus. While the debate goes on over history and its (mis)-representation, here’s a genuine nugget from the 19th and 20th centuries that led to a radical change in how classrooms across the country are administered to this day.
Remember class monitors in school? Those peers who were assigned special responsibilities, like ensuring the classroom doesn’t make ‘noise’, or that a physical exercise or a parade is conducted well. Often, class monitors maintained discipline by threatening to write down the names of errant peers on the board for the benefit of the teacher, who could then ‘discipline’ said students.
This system of instruction and supervision was introduced by the British in the colonial period. Deemed efficient and cost-effective, the monitorial system was used in most British colonies by the end of the 19th century; the United Kingdom and the United States of America being the first two countries to embrace this model of peer education. It later got adopted into military academies and other organisations with large-scale instructional needs.
Very few remember that the origin of this system lies in the traditional pial schools of the erstwhile Madras Presidency, from where it was picked up and repurposed by Andrew Bell, an army chaplain who served in Madras from 1789 to 1796. Pial schools were typically run in a temple, with the porch of the temple serving as the classroom space.
Andrew Bell noticed such schools during his time in Madras. Brahminical texts such as Manusmriti and other Dharma Shastras restrict access to knowledge, excluding the wider mass of Hindus. However, both early Vedic texts and various reformers from the medieval period have advocated for the universal dissemination of religious knowledge. But this knowledge, ie, scriptures and other texts, was invariably in Sanskrit, which itself was known only to Brahmins and a few elites from Kshatriya and Vaishya castes.
For the most part, temple schools such as pials catered to so-called high caste children. The logic of exclusion was that under the caste system, every group had its traditional occupation and therefore a cobbler’s job couldn’t be performed by a Kshatriya and vice-versa.
Discovery of pial and the emergence of the Madras system
Born in 1753 in Scotland, Bell had come to Madras via a short stint as a private tutor in Virginia, USA. He returned home in 1781 and avoided the American War of Independence. In 1784, he was ordained as a priest, after which he decided to head towards India, which was emerging as the new land of opportunity for both the Anglican church and the Crown. Instead of reaching Calcutta, the preferred destination for Britishers, looking to make a fortune, Bell instead landed in Madras and started working as the superintendent of a military male orphan school as well as an army chaplain.
The first fort that the British established in India was Fort St George in Madras (now Chennai) in 1639. In the decades that followed, their rule was challenged by the French, but ultimately the British prevailed. By the 1750s, their presence had lasted over a century, during the course of which many Anglo-Indian children had been born. Frequently abandoned or orphaned, these children of English men and Indian women were regarded as half-English and therefore the responsibility of the Crown. Towards taking care of such orphans, the British had established a local orphanage.
A 1939 article in the Glasgow Herald published to commemorate the centenary of the Madras Monitorial System recalled Andrew Bell’s initial struggle. “It would seem that he had early and rightly formed a poor opinion of his teaching staff, a body of men both inefficient and ill-disposed to their work. Then one day, riding past an open-air native school, he saw the younger children writing with their fingers on sand strewn on the ground before them.” The method struck him. It had both scriptural sanction and the possibility of success. He orders that it be adopted forthwith in the asylum. “The usher of the lower classes flatly condemned it as a pedagogic impossibility. Bell, disgusted by such recalcitrance, impulsively put a little boy called Johnnie Frisken in charge of the beginners. And here was born the Madras or monitorial system of teaching”.
This learning-by-teaching and mutual instruction method soon captured the imagination of people back home in the UK, where Bell became a sort of celebrity, and to which he returned never to visit India again. He had returned with a fortune of nearly 30,000 pounds, a large portion of which he dedicated to the cause of education and moral instruction. In Fife, Scotland, the Madras College came up, based on the Bell model, and he also supported schools in other places such as Inverness, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Leithe.
Quaker-Anglican Rivalry over Pial System
While the Bell Monitorial System had taken firm roots by the mid-19th century, it faced challenges from a former pupil. Joseph Lancaster, born in London in 1778, came up with a similar model to Bell’s with the minor tweak of recursive learning through peer tutoring. The two models, while similar, were opposed to each other based on the ideological differences between Quakers, the belief system Lancaster espoused, and the Church of England, whose ardent devotee was Bell.
Backed by non-conformist establishment figures like Jeremy Bentham and other Quakers, the Lancastrian system flourished and spread to other parts of the British Empire. While the Quakers propounded a liberal and non-sectarian stance within education, the followers of Bell favoured the Church of England’s Anglicanism. This led to the formation of separate school societies, both claiming to be owners of the monitorial system, and in this unseemly rivalry, it was quickly forgotten how a little school in Madras had originally inspired both models.
HistoriCity is author Valay Singh’s column narrating the story of a city in the news by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.
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