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Diffusing useful knowledge: the monitorial system of education in Madras,London and Bengal, 1789-1840Jana Tschureneva

a Comparative Education Center, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

To cite this Article Tschurenev, Jana(2008) 'Diffusing useful knowledge: the monitorial system of education in Madras,London and Bengal, 1789-1840', Paedagogica Historica, 44: 3, 245 — 264To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00309230802041526URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230802041526

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Paedagogica HistoricaVol. 44, No. 3, June 2008, 245–264

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Diffusing useful knowledge: the monitorial system of education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840

Jana Tschurenev*

Comparative Education Center, Humboldt University of Berlin, GermanyTaylor and FrancisCPDH_A_304320.sgm(Received January 2006; final version received 12 December 2006)

10.1080/00309230802041526Paedagogica Historica0030-9230 (print)/1477-674X (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis0000000002008JanaTschurenevjana.tschurenev@staff.hu-berlin.deThis paper addresses some fundamental aspects of the circulation of knowledge connected withthe spread of the first global model of school management and classroom organisation in theearly nineteenth century: the so-called “monitorial system of education” or, as it was namedafter its “inventors”, the “Bell–Lancaster Method”. By looking at the communication ofeducational ideas between England and the early British possessions in India, this paper firstanalyses the actors involved in this process, especially their agendas and means. Inspired bythe widespread belief in the powers of education to improve both society as a whole andindividuals, educational activists gathered in a number of committees and organisations –among whom the “British and Foreign School Society” proved most influential. Protestantmissionary societies also became active in the field of popular education. The monitorial systemof education attracted social reformers, British as well as Indian, and missionaries to whom itappeared to be a technology with civilising powers, a rational instrument to morally uplift and,at the same time, subject individuals “to their respective places” in society. Second, the paperlooks at the processes of hybridisation and transformation of the pedagogical knowledge thatwas communicated between India and England: the origins of the monitorial system in anorphanage school at Madras, its export to London, where it was developed into a standardisedmodel, and its subsequent “re-import” into India. Finally, reports about the implementation ofthe monitorial system in India again had an impact on English public discourses on education.

Keywords: monitorial system of education; discipline; colonialism; British Empire; India;British and Foreign School Society; missionaries; civil society; knowledge flows/transfer

A framework to explain early imperial knowledge flows

This paper1 addresses some aspects of the circulation of knowledge connected with the firstglobal model of school management and classroom organisation in the early nineteenth century:the so-called monitorial system of education or, named after its “inventors”, the “Bell–LancasterMethod”. By looking at the communication of educational ideas between the early British Indianterritories and England, especially London, this paper analyses, first, the actors or mediators ofknowledge involved in this process and, second, the dimensions and transformations of theknowledge mediated. I am thus trying to contribute to the discourse on the globalisation of

*Email: jana.tschurenev@staff.hu-berlin.de1The paper presents part of my work in the research group “National Education and Universal Method” atthe Comparative Education Center, Humboldt University of Berlin, funded by the German ResearchCouncil. I gained much inspiration from the ongoing discussions with my colleagues Marcelo Caruso,Patrick Ressler, Gabriela Trentin, Thomas Schupp, and Eugenia Roldan Vera. A preliminary version ofthis paper has been fruitfully discussed with the participants of the Summer Academy; “Experts andMediators of Knowledge in the 20th Century: Transregional Perspectives”, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin,September 2005. I also want to thank Urs Lindner and Florian Waldow for their helpful comments.

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educational knowledge and institutions in the field of comparative education from a historicalperspective.

Some of the questions are drawn from debates on one of the major theoretical frameworksfor comparative education research, the neoinstitutionalist school of sociology at Stanford Univer-sity.2 One of the core issues of the neoinstitutionalist approach is a global convergence of insti-tutions – a term used in a very broad sense, meaning organisational structures as well as culturalnormative standards and “myths”. Educational research within the neoinstitutionalist frameincludes large-scale empirical studies on – just to mention a few examples – international curric-ulum developments, the global circulation of certain reforms, or new trends in health or citizenshipeducation. On the other hand, institutionalism seeks explanations for the major “diffusion”processes that took place (mainly) during the last 200 years, such as the spread of the nation-state, of human rights, or of institutions such as universities and educational ministries. In thispaper, I employ some neoinstitutional assumptions regarding the conditions of model transfer toaccount for the appeal of the monitorial system within the British Empire. However, I also wantto confront two aspects of the diffusionist model with insights from recent debates on colonialhistory and the re-examination of the complex interconnections, links and relations betweenmetropoles and overseas territories, and with the sources on the monitorial system in India.

The first question concerns the centre–periphery nexus and the directionality of knowledgeflows in the historical context of the making of the British eastern empire. If one follows EnriqueDussel’s shift from the “eurocentric” to a “global paradigm”,3 historical research has to reflecton Europe’s position in a global context, looking not only at the “impact” of the West on therest but at communication within and between England and India. Connected to these issues ofmutuality and re-positioning of the centre, a recent thread of historical research focuses on thematerial and symbolic impacts of coloniality on the metropolis as well as parallel and intercon-nected developments within empires. As Cooper and Stoler put it, metropole and the colony haveto be researched within a common analytical frame.4

Thus, in contrast to notions of one-way knowledge transfer, I want to show that even undercolonial conditions one cannot assume a simple export of European institutions and rationalscientific knowledge to the colonised territories. Of course, the colonial relations of power didnot stimulate symmetrical contacts – the knowledge flows differed. One concept to describe thisasymmetrical exchange of knowledge is that of colonies as laboratories for social policies. It hasbeen demonstrated that Europeans tried out new governmental techniques and institutions aswell as novel forms of economic production in the colonies, and that these colonial experimentsbrought about a wide range of cultural, as well as material, repercussions in the “motherlands”.5

This is also a possibility to describe what happened with the monitorial system, as I will show.

2J.W. Meyer, D. H. Kamens and A. Benavot. School Knowledge for the Masses. World Models andNational Primary Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Falmer Press, 1992);John W. Meyer. Weltkultur: wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 2005); for a critique see Jürgen Schriewer, “Multiple Internationalities: The Emergence of aWorld-Level Ideology and the Persistence of Idiosyncratic World-Views,” in Transnational IntellectualNetworks. Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities, ed. J. Schriewer,C. Charle and P. Wagner (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2004).3Enrique Dussel. “Beyond Eurocentrism. The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,” in TheCultures of Globalization, ed. F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).4F. Cooper, and A. L. Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1997). See also: John Marriot, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India andProgress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).5Eric Stokes. The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Sydney Mintz. Sweetnessand Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986); GauriViswanathan. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1990).

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The second issue I want to address is the flexibility and fluidity of models themselves. Incontrast to rather technical conceptions of globally transmitted knowledge as standard “tools”,such as one can see, for instance, in the strategies of model transfer and “best practices” in inter-national NGOs and donor organisations, I would like to show how an authoritative model itselfis transformed in the process of its communication and implementation and thus brings forth newvarieties. This means also connecting macro-level analysis of transcontinental networksand communication with intermediary-level questions of model adaptation by specific actors inscenes of political conflict as well as the micro-level of interaction between educationalists,teachers and students. It becomes clear that “convergence” cannot be observed if one leaves themacro-level.

After giving a short overview of the genesis and global spread of monitorial schooling, Iwill introduce the main actors involved in this process – for the most part globally activemissionary and school societies as well as local private associations – including their objectivesand the means they employed. This includes considering the role of the emerging “civil soci-ety” in the building of colonial empires. Afterwards, I will look at two kinds of knowledgetransmission: firstly, the use of the monitorial system for the “diffusion of useful knowledge”among poor urban children of European descent in Madras, London and Calcutta, as well asamong the “natives” of India; and secondly, the communication about the monitorial systembetween Madras, London, and Calcutta, thereby addressing questions of originality, hybridityand repercussions.

Model-making and spread

In 1789, Andrew Bell, chaplain in Madras, India, started a school for the illegitimate offspringof European soldiers in order to rescue them from the “corrupting” influence of their Indian moth-ers and to “render” them “useful” members of the (European) community. Combining teachingpractices from local Hindu schools with “system, method and order”, he “invented” a new wayof organising his school. After returning to London, he published an account of his experiments.6

The book did not attract a lot of attention until, some years later, Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker andyoung schoolmaster in London, initiated a campaign for the “education of the poor” by publishinga report of his school as a model for large-scale elementary education. Although Bell andLancaster most probably developed their classroom arrangements independently, their conceptsclosely resembled each other.

In the context of a controversial debate about the extent of and the responsibility fornational education,7 the experiments of Bell and Lancaster were gradually combined and trans-formed into a comprehensive model of elementary schooling, the so-called monitorial systemof education. This method promised that one schoolmaster would be able to teach a largegroup of pupils in one single room at the same time. The master just had to instruct a certainnumber of the most advanced pupils, called monitors by Lancaster, who would then teach andsupervise their peers:

6Andrew Bell. An Experiment in Education, Made at the Male Asylum at Madras, Suggesting a System byWhich a School or Family May Teach Itself Under the Superintendence of the Master or the Parent(London, 1797); for the quotes see pp. 7–9.7Sarah Trimmer. A Comparative View of Education Promulgated by Mr. Joseph Lancaster, in his TractsConcerning the Instruction of the Children of the Labouring Part of the Community; and of the System ofChristian Education founded by our Pious Forfathers for the Initiation of the Young Members of theEstablished Church in the Principles of the Reformed Religion (London: Rivingtons, 1805); Joseph Fox. AScriptural Education the Glory of England: Being a Defense of the Lancastrian Plan of Education, andthe Bible Society, in Answer to the Publications of the Rev. C. Daubeny, Archdeacon of Sarum, the Rev.Dr. Wordsworth, the Rev. Mr. Spry &c. &c. (London: Royal Free School Press, 1810).

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This system rests in the simple principle of tuition by the scholars themselves. It is its distinguishingcharacteristic that the school, how numerous so ever, is taught solely by the pupils of the institutionunder a single master, who if able and diligent, could, without difficulty conduct ten contiguousschools, each consisting of a thousand scholars.8

The order, which was essential for teaching large groups, was maintained by a strict disciplinaryregime based on constant examination, panoptic surveillance by the master, and mutual controlof the students.9 For Lancaster and Bell, the moral sentiment of “emulation”, stipulated by astrong internal hierarchy based on merit, was the instrument to produce fruitful competitionamong the scholars.10 Ranks and offices continuously rotated. Low-achieving monitors could bereplaced by better pupils, and even within classes, the children were constantly re-ranked accord-ing to their proficiency. The hope of being promoted and the fear of being downgraded were seenas incentives to industry and discipline. Thus, monitorial schools were meant to function as, inBell’s terms, “moral and intellectual machines” to improve children as well as society.

Starting from England as the initial focus of both Bell and Lancaster, monitorial teachingsoon became discussed internationally and widely adapted: in France, Russia and the OttomanEmpire; in the United States and Spanish America, as well as West Africa and India. In a numberof places, such as England, New York and Philadelphia, parts of Latin America and EasternEurope as well as in colonial contexts, monitorial schools even became the nucleus of publicelementary education.11

A variety of factors can be given to account for this global appeal. What I want to stress inthis paper – relying on an argument developed with my colleague Patrick Ressler12 – are somecharacteristics of the actors involved in the spread of the Bell–Lancaster Method and of the modelitself. I employ an approach that David Strang and John W. Meyer use for explaining (institu-tional) conditions of global model “diffusion” processes operating in modern social systems.Their main argument is that “connectedness” – the core variable stressed by network analysis –cannot fully explain the rate and shape of “diffusion”. Innovations, they argue, not only easily“diffuse along the lines of social relations, but also to other actors broadly considered similar”.13

8Andrew Bell. Instructions for Conducting a School, Through the Agency of the Scholars Themselves(London: Rivingtons, 1808), 3.9See: Michel Foucault. Überwachen und Strafen (Discipline and Punish) (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp,1991), 220–50; David Hogan. “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and thePsychology of the Early Classroom System,” History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1989): 381–417.10Hamilton, David. “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System,” Journal ofCurriculum Studies 12, no. 4 (1980): 281–98.11A general overview on the spread of the monitorial system is given by Carl Frederick Kaestle.Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement (New York: Teachers College Press, 1973) andJ. Schriewer and M. Caruso, eds. Nationalerziehung und Universalmethode – frühe Formenschulorganisatorischer Globalisierung (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005) (= Comparativ 15,No. 1, 2005). For Latin America see M. Caruso and E. Roldán Vera, eds. Pluralizing Meanings: TheMonitorial System of Education in Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century (= PaedagogicaHistorica 41, No. 5, 2005); for South Eastern Europe: Fikret Adanir. “Die Schulbildung in Griechenland(1750–1830) und in Bulgarien (1750–1878) im Spannungsfeld von Bewahrung der ethnisch-konfessionellen Identität, Entstehung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und Herausbildung desNationalbewusstseins,” in Revolutionen des Wissens?, ed. W. Schmale and N.L. Dodde (Bochum:Winkler, 1991); Minko Gecev. Ognishta na narodnata svyast: Vzaimnite ucilishteta v Balgaria (Sofia,1995).12P. Ressler and J. Tschurenev. “Trajectories of Merit: The Modelling and Spread of MonitorialSchooling” (paper presented at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference,Stanford University, March 2005).13D. Strang and J.W. Meyer. “Institutional Conditions for Diffusion,” Theory and Society 22 (1993):487–511, 492.

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This means that the legitimate social actors of modernity, nation-states, organisations and indi-viduals observe and compare each other and thereby adopt practices and institutions. I want tocome back to this issue of perceived actor similarity and peer observation in the next part of thispaper. The second condition stressed by Strang and Meyer is related to the nature of the practiceslikely to “diffuse”: these have to undergo a process of “theorisation”. “Theorised accounts” definewho can use a certain innovation and for which purpose. By “simplify[ing] the properties andspecify[ing] the outcomes” of an innovation they predict that the innovation “can be adopted byall members of a theoretically defined population with similar effects”.14 This mechanism canhelp to explain something about, for instance, the circulation of certain accounting practicesamong a wide range of governmental and non-governmental organisations, or the similarities ofcurrent projects to restructure higher education systems. I will return to this point – the story ofthe theorisation of the monitorial system – in the last section, which addresses the circulation andtransformation of knowledge between Britain and India.

However, the monitorial system was not only a comprehensive model; it also proved quiteflexible and adaptable to various contexts. Particularly with regard to the wider agendas usuallyconnected with education, monitorial teaching served a range of different purposes. In Englandfor instance, the aim was not only to prepare the so-called labouring poor for increasingly indus-trialised working lives but also to practise discipline and subordination or, speaking with AndrewBell, to educate “good scholars, good subjects and good Christians”15. In the new republics ofLatin America, the meritocratic rotation of ranks and offices was sometimes perceived as an aptmeans for educating the children in habits of republican citizenship.16 In the British Empire,where missionary societies employed the method, the basic objective could be described as acivilising mission and the “praeparatio evangelica”. Thus, Bell’s Madras experiments wereeventually re-exported also to India in the form of a standardised, authoritative model.

Reformers, civilising missionaries, social engineers: the users of the monitorial system of education in the emerging British Empire

One can interpret the monitorial movement as one of the early nineteenth-century efforts tostandardise, systematise and reform education. It was a process supported by committed individ-uals, administrators and officials but – at least as far as the emerging British Empire was concerned– mainly by interconnected and transcontinentally active modern civil society associations.

Among the users of the monitorial system in the empire were, firstly, the organisationsfounded by supporters of Lancaster and Bell in order to spread the monitorial system inEngland and abroad. The Royal Lancasterian Society was founded in 1808 and transformedinto the British and Foreign School Society (henceforth: BFSS) in 1813. It pursued the doublemission of promoting the education of the poor in England as well as of the “heathen” abroad.The BFSS was supported by a number of prominent patrons, including the English King and avariety of persons concerned with social reform: by utilitarians like James Mill, liberals likeDavid Ricardo and abolitionists like William Allen.17 In terms of religion, the BFSS was

14Strang and Meyer, “Conditions,” 496–7.15Bell, An Experiment in Education, 32.16Eugenia Roldán Vera. “Order in the Classroom: The Spanish American Appropriation of the MonitorialSystem of Education,” in Pluralizing Meanings, ed. Caruso and Roldán Vera.17George Bartle. “Benthamites and Lancasterians – The relationship between the followers of Benthamand the British and Foreign School Society during the early years of Popular Education,” Utilitas 3(1991): 275–88; idem. “The Role of the British and Foreign School Society in the Education of poorchildren of the Metropolis during the first half of the 19th Century,” Journal of EducationalAdministration and History 24 (1992): 74–90.

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based in dissenting communities and in the evangelical movement. The National Society forthe Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church (National EducationSociety, henceforth: NES) was founded in 1811, to ensure that a large-scale elementary educa-tion system would be controlled by the Anglican Establishment. To counterbalance the successof the Quaker Lancaster, the Church party – under the patronage of the Archbishop of Canter-bury – promoted a system traced to Andrew Bell only. The NES proved more successful inEngland compared with its competitor, while the BFSS established a large internationalnetwork. However, the numerous local committees of both organisations cooperated closelyand were often supported by the same sponsors. Both organisations developed a set of handymanuals on how to conduct a monitorial school as well as teaching materials, such as, forinstance, spelling tables. Their second core activity was teacher training: candidates frommissionary societies and youth from several countries studied the monitorial system at“Borough Road”, the normal school of the BFSS, and at the NES central institution. After-wards they were sent out to conduct schools in Africa, Asia, South Eastern Europe, Russia,Australia and the Americas.18

The second group of actors involved were some of the novel protestant missionary societiesfounded in the late eighteenth century. In Bengal, and to a lesser extent in Madras and Bombay,the other bridgeheads of early British power in India, the Baptist, Church and London Mission-ary Societies (henceforth: BMS, CMS, LMS) established schools for the so-called “Eurasians”,or “indigent Christians”, i.e. the poor urban population of European descent, as part of an internalcivilising mission. Moreover, they initiated the building of local elementary education systemsfor the “natives” in order to “prepare” them for the adoption of the gospel. For this purpose theyinitiated a number of local school societies, which became the third important actor in the spreadof monitorial schools in South Asia.

Some of these school societies, such as the Society for Native Schools19 in Serampore, astation in the vicinity of Calcutta, were conducted by the missionaries themselves or, in the caseof the Calcutta Female Juvenile Society for the Establishment and Support of Bengalee FemaleSchools20, in cooperation with other European “gentlemen” and “ladies”. However, in most ofthem, especially the largest and most successful ones, the new urban Hindu elites, the bhadralok,took an active part. In 1817, the Baptist and London missionaries initiated the foundation ofthe Calcutta School Book Society (henceforth: CSBS), which became a joint venture of almostall education activists in Calcutta – employees of the East India Company, churchmen, almostall missionary societies, as well as a number of bhadralok. In the early 1820s they supplied themajority of elementary schools in Bengal with textbooks and teaching materials, most of themprepared by the Baptist and London missionaries. In 1818, the CSBS was supplemented by theCalcutta School Society (henceforth: CSS) that aimed at “improving” existing indigenousschools through constant superintendence and quality control and by promoting the books of theCSBS.21 In Bombay, the Bombay Native School Book and School Society was formed in 1822

18Annual Reports of the British and Foreign School Society. (Egham, UK: BFSS Archive Centre, BrunelUniversity, 1814–1830).19Joshua Marshman. Hints Relative to Native Schools together with an Outline of an Institution for theirExtension and Management (Serampore: Mission Press, 1816).20The Third Report of the Calcutta Female Juvenile Society for the Establishment and Support ofBengalee Female Schools (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1823).21N.L. Basak. “Origin and Role of the Calcutta School Book Society in Promoting the Cause ofEducation in India, especially Vernacular Education in Bengal (1817–1835),” Bengal Past and Present(1959): 30–69; Charles Lushington. The History, Design, and Present State of the Religious, Benevolentand Charitable Institutions, Founded by the British in Calcutta and its Vicinity (Calcutta: HindustaneePress, 1824), 156–84.

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by indigenous elites, together with some English. All positions in this association were doubleoccupied – by a “respectable native” and a “European gentleman”. Like the CSBS and CSS, theycompiled grammars and textbooks in the vernacular languages and aimed to harmonise the oper-ation of existing schools according to the monitorial system. Moreover, they founded a teachertraining institution to supply indigenous schools with masters competent in the new system.22

What all these societies – the BFSS and NES, the missionary societies as well as the localschool societies and committees – had in common was a specifically modern type of organisa-tion. They were based on private contributions, often in the form of regular donations of smallamounts of money, i.e. public subscriptions, on voluntary service and a system of reports andaccounts presented to an interested readership. Outside the state or church establishment, theyemerged as part of a new public sphere that was not confined to the limits of one nation-state,not even to Old Europe.23 The organisations using the monitorial system in England and over-seas were closely connected. The missionaries stayed in contact with the BFSS in order toreceive trained teachers as experts of the monitorial system, as well as the latest teachingmanuals and materials and, at the same time, to present their own local experiences to an Englishaudience.24 Thus, an intercontinental network of educational activists emerged, within but alsooutside the boundaries of colonial rule.

How can one explain the emergence of this kind of actor in the field of popular schooling?First of all, it was the absence of state institutions and regulations regarding primary educationthat left a gap to be filled by private initiatives. Interestingly enough, the situation in Englandand India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries looked quite comparable in thisregard. Contrary to Prussia, where the state had already started to regulate education – as withthe formal introduction of compulsory education in 1763,25 the scene in England was left tothe church and religious communities, such as the Sunday and charity school movements,26 orto local private initiatives by craftsmen or their wives.27 It was not until the early 1830s that thestate entered the field of popular education by supplying funds to the NES and BFSS for theestablishment of schools. Afterwards, state involvement increased by means of raising funds andinstalling inspectors to supervise the performance of schools and thus to establish a kind ofpayment by results.28

22Arthur Howell. Education in British India, prior to 1854, and in 1870–71 (Calcutta: GovernmentPrinting, 1872), 62–3.23This is maybe one of the limitations of Jürgen Habermas’ famous study about the “transformation of thepublic sphere”: Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorieder bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).24BFSS Annual Reports, starting from 1814; Quarterly Extracts from the Correspondence &c. of theBritish and Foreign School Society (BFSS Archives, 1827–1848).25Heinz-Elmar Tenorth. “Das ‘pädagogische Jahrhundert’ – der Aufbruch zur Moderne imErziehungskonzept der Aufklärung,” in Geschichte der Erziehung: Einführung in die Grundzüge ihrerneuzeitlichen Entwicklung (München: Juventa-Verlag, 1988).26Phillip McCann. “Popular education, socialisation and social control: Spitalfields 1812–1824,” inPopular Education and Socialisation in the Nineteenth Century, ed. P. McCann (London: Methuen,1979).27That is the scene Lancaster describes in his first essay: Joseph Lancaster. Improvements in Education, asIt Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community: Containing, a Short Account of Its Present State,Hints Towards Its Improvement, and a Detail of Some Practical Experiments Conducive to That End(London, 1803). See also: Thomas W. Laqueur. “Working-Class Demand and the Growth of EnglishElementary Education, 1750–1850,” in Schooling and Society, ed. L. Stone (Baltimore and London: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1978).28Bruce Curtis. “Capitalist Development and Educational Reform: Comparative Material from England,Ireland and Upper Canada to 1850,” Theory and Society 13 (1984): 41–68.

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For India one can assume quite a similar situation, although it has to be kept in mind that thesources on the subject of pre-colonial education are rare. In most of the towns and larger villages,boys and also some girls were taught writing and arithmetic together with basic religious instruc-tion in the so-called patshalas. These vernacular village schools were mostly taught by Brahminsor Kayasths (a writers’ caste). Sometimes they were materially supported by a wealthy localpatron. Merchants’ communities also supplied schools in towns.29 From the early eighteenthcentury, mission schools were added to the scene, such as for instance by the German mission-aries of Tranquebar, South India.30 The colonial governments came in in 1813 – i.e., muchearlier than in the “mother country” – when the East India Company was bound to invest£10,000 annually in the education of the new British subjects in India under the so-called piousclauses of its new charter. In the 1820s, attempts followed to extend governmental influence bymeans of installing the Committee for Public Instruction in Bengal, or, the Board of PublicInstruction in Bombay, in order to base the funding on systematic control. Another governmentalinitiative was large-scale data collection on the extent and quality of indigenous educationalinstitutions in Madras, Bombay and Bengal. However, during the first decades of the nineteenthcentury, non-state organisations remained the main actors in the field of elementary education.31

The development of these organisations stands in the context of large-scale private effortsto reform society in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England. A new class of“friends of popular reformation”, acting upon “patriotism, liberality, and moral principle”,pursued the civilisation, cultivation and moralisation of the “lower orders of society”, whom theyviewed as a “rude, unprincipled, semi-barbarous populace”.32 Middle-class reformers started tovisit the houses of “the poor” in order to enquire into their “moral conditions” or to distributebibles. Moreover, there was a new growth of disciplinary institutions, concepts and techniques.Starting from several local initiatives, for instance projects of dissenting communities for thestrict and orderly conduct of life (Lebensführung, in Weber’s terms), the techniques thatFoucault analysed as disciplines diffused and became partially institutionalised in prisons, work-houses and barracks.33 In the sector of pedagogy, it was mainly the monitorial schools that usedthe disciplinary techniques in the early nineteenth century.34

The creation of these disciplinary institutions and techniques can be interpreted in the contextof efforts of self-affirmation of the new middle class by means of what has been analysed as a

29Dharmpal. The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi:Biblia Impex Private Limited, 1983); B. M. Sankhdher, ed., Education System from 1857 to WilliamHunter’s Commission, 1882 (New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1999); J.E. Gründler andB. Ziegenbalg. Die malabarische Korrespondenz: tamilische Briefe an deutsche Missionare, ed. and intro.Kurt Liebau.(Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1998).30Heike Liebau. “Faith and Knowledge: The Educational System of the Danish–Halle and English–HalleMission,” in Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India, ed. A. Gross, Y.V. Kumaradossand H. Liebau (Halle: Franckesche Stiftungen, 2006), Vol. 3.31“Fisher’s Memoir on Native Schools,” 1826. In Indian Education in the Parliamentary Papers, Part I(1832), ed. A.N. Basu (Bombay and Calcutta: Asia Publishing House, 1952); Michael Andrew Laird.Missionaries and Education in Bengal, 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).32John Foster. An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance (London, 1820): quoted from EBook http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8940.33Michel Foucault. Die Wahrheit und die juristischen Formen [Truth and Juridical Forms] (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004).34Foucault, Überwachen und Strafen, 220–50; Hogan, “Market Revolution”; John Hassard. “ResearchingFoucault’s Research: Organization and Control in Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial Schools” (papersubmitted to the Critical Management Workshop, Academy of Management Conference, Denver,Colorado, 2002): http://group.aomonline.org/cms/Meetings/Denver/hassard.htm.

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double civilising mission.35 Internally it targeted the urban poor of the metropolis. Externally itwas directed towards the “heathen” population of the overseas territories, who became an objectof “British feeling and humanity” because of “the ties of common nature that unite man to man”and whom, moreover, providence had brought “under the fostering care of Britain” as fellow-subjects under the same sovereign.36 One can find this double focus, as well as the self-assuringattitude of English middle-class philanthropy, prototypically in an appeal to the public to takecare of the education of the “natives of India”, by the Baptist missionaries of Serampore:

The present state of society in Britain is perhaps distinguished more strongly by no feature, than bythat of a benevolent concern for the welfare of others. That sentiment “Am I my brother’s keeper?”has been more fully discountenanced at no time since it was first uttered, than in the presentperiod. Not only have the wretched and the ignorant at home been sought out, and their cases metwith an earnestness unexampled in any former period of our national history; the deplorablecircumstances of the African negro have attracted notice; and philanthropy, after evincing its mightby rending asunder the ponderous chain of slavery, is still demonstrating its celestial origin byattempting to impart to the natives of Africa all those blessings which emanate from knowledgeand civilization.37

This double civilising zeal of the “friends of popular reformation” that brought about organisa-tions active at home and abroad is closely connected to Empire-building. On the one hand,populations practically came into the reach of civilising missionaries by the extension ofcolonial territories. On the other hand, the “discovery” of the world had an impact on theworldviews of Europeans and thus shaped novel activities. There was a notion of a special posi-tion of Britannia in the world, a “pre-eminence among the nations which the god of providencehas given her”.38 Moreover, the idea of millions of “heathen” and “savages” all over the globe“dwelling in darkness” was an important drive for the evangelical movement and the urgentwish of individuals to spread the gospel. Vice versa, the conditions of the lower classes inEngland were compared to those of “savages” and thus, the necessity for reform wasconfirmed.39

Organising for social reform was not confined to Britain or the British in India. The firstthree decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a modern public of well-educatedindigenous elites, especially in Calcutta, the most important bridgehead of British power inIndia. This meant not only the formation of journals and newspapers in Bengali, English andPersian, as well the circulation of pamphlets and tracts as a means of political articulation. Thebhadralok started social discipline, or social reform projects of their own. In the first place, therewas a movement towards a reform of religion – a kind of protestantisation of Hinduism thatmeant, in short, a substitution of popular rituals for scriptural fundaments. Connected to this wasan “invention” of Hindu traditions in contrast to European culture. However, the bhadralokappropriated elements of the colonial view on Bengali popular culture and practices and were

35Catherine Hall. “Introduction,” in Civilizing Subjects (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002); Harald Fischer-Tiné.“Britain’s other civilising mission: Class-prejudice, European “Loaferism” and the Workhouse System inColonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 3 (2005): 295–338; idem. “ReclaimingSavages: The Salvation Army in ‘Darkest England’ and ‘Darkest India’ (ca. 1880–1920)” (paperpresented at the 19th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Leiden, the Netherlands,2006).36Marshman, Hints Relative to Native Schools, 5.37Ibid., 5.38Ibid., 14.39Brian Stanley. The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792–1992 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,1992). Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Judith R. Walkowitz. City of Dreadful Delight:Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992).

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anxious to distinguish themselves through “respectable” conduct and through efforts to improvethe manners and morals of the lower classes.40 Thus, while they claimed civil respectability forthemselves, the bhadralok also adopted and “vernacularised” the discourse of social improve-ment.41 At this junction of British and indigenised civilising missions the CSBS and CSSemerged as joint ventures of Europeans and indigenous elites in India, as “Europeo-Native”institutions.42 These organisations were the hybrid product of the colonial encounter. On the onehand, they were inspired by the British model of organised philanthropy. On the other hand, theydefined their aims and target groups with regard to local circumstances.

In the civilising and disciplinary projects from the second half of the eighteenth centuryonwards, in the metropole as well as in the colonial “contact zone”,43 education played a crucialrole. The bhadralok completely agreed that education was a core issue of social reform. Opinionsamong them differed only on the main focus, i.e. elementary vs. higher education, and themedium of instruction, i.e. English vs. modernised vernacular languages. The British advocatesof “uplift” emphasised the disastrous effects of “ignorance” on the welfare of the state, asdisplayed most clearly in Foster’s famous Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance. The “igno-rance” of a people was not only regarded as a “national dishonour” when compared with othercountries. Forster feared that without educational programmes “generation after generation[would be] lost”, a fact that might lead, in the end, to “the destruction of national safety”.44

Regarding India, the Baptist missionaries of Serampore came to the conclusion that the “lack ofknowledge” of the Hindus leads to a “degradation of morals and manners” that “sink[s] them farbelow most savage nations in vice and immorality”.45 The problem seemed to be even worsewhen contrasted with the almost unlimited opportunities attributed to education that were wasted:“Think of their state as it is and what it might have been!”46 The actors involved with the moni-torial system of education could rely on a widespread notion of a causal connection betweenpublic education and the common good.47 Joseph Lancaster knew himself to be in perfect agree-ment with public opinion when he argued that “the propagation of knowledge” proves “beneficialto society, in the improved principles and conduct of its members”.48 “All are agreed”, wroteAndrew Bell, “that the increase of learning and good morals are great blessings to society”.Education “ameliorate[s] the rising generation, and improve[s] the state of society”.49 The

40For the making of the new Bengali middle class see S.N. Mukherjee. “Class, Caste and Politics inCalcutta, 1815–1838,” in Elites in South Asia, ed. E. Leach and S.N. Mukherjee (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1970). David Kopf. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics ofIndian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969); R.K. Majumdar. Rammohan Roy and theProgressive Movement of Bengal (Calcutta, 1983). For the new respectability codes that were stronglyconnected to gender issues see K. Sangari and S. Vaid. eds. Recasting Women. Essays in Indian ColonialHistory (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).41Brian Hatcher. Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta andOxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).42Report of the Calcutta School Society’s Proceedings (Calcutta School Book Society, 1818).43Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).44Foster, Evils of Popular Ignorance.45Marshman, Hints Relative to Native Schools, 7–9.46Foster, Evils of Popular Ignorance.47For the construction of this link between education and the reduction of crime and poverty see K. Jonesand K. Williamson. “The Birth of the Schoolroom. A Study of the Transformation in the DiscursiveConditions of English Popular Education in the First half of the Nineteenth Century,” Ideology andConsciousness 6 (1979): 59–110.48Lancaster, Improvements, v49Bell, Experiment, 28, 36.

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powers of education could be reduced to a simple formula: “ignorance leads to crime, educationprevents it”.50

Now, if the actors concerned shared a certain aim, i.e. to improve society through the meansof education, how did they pursue it? It seems that in the English as well as in the Indian casesone strategy was common: firstly, to undertake a survey or problem analysis based on observa-tion among a given population and to publish it together with proposals for a remedy; andsecondly to found an organisation or at least a local committee to start the proposed enterprise.That is exactly how Lancaster proceeds in his first treatise. In the first part he gives an “accountof the state of those schools in which the children of mechanics, &c. are generally educated”. Hedescribes the problems of these schools, especially the waste of time and money, explains howthese problems emerge – the lack of proper regulations, management and order, due to theabsence of trained teachers – and suggests a solution: the foundation of a society that enhancesthe quality of existing schools by promoting his “improvements” in classroom organisation as amodel, assists in training competent masters and superintends the conduct of schools. With theBFSS, he hoped to realise the plan.

The Indian example I want to give is again the BMS. William Carey, Joshua Marshman andWilliam Ward from the Serampore station defined two target groups, whose living conditionsthey tried to reform through the use of the monitorial system. On the one hand, they wereconcerned with the “indigent Christians” of Calcutta, the descendants of Europeans, mostlyPortuguese, or English. Most of them just “bearing the Christian name” occupied “the lowestwalks of life” and had “been by their poverty precluded the advantages of Christian Education”.Thus, they “are in a state of ignorance if possible greater than that of their Hindoo and Musulmanneighbours…” [sic]. The Serampore missionaries made an inquiry into the size of that popula-tion and estimated it as 7000 persons in Calcutta. They argued that it needed a special plan toinclude all the children from that social stratum and found:

[t]he plan of instruction matured by Mr. Lancaster … well adapted to meet the circumstances ofthese numerous and wretched victims to ignorance and vice. Its simplicity is admirably suited toconvey instruction to the untutored mind, and that happy method that enables Lancaster himself toinstruct alone a thousand poor children in London, at an expense which would scarcely board fifty,is exactly fitted to extend the same benefit to the multitudes of children here who are in a sphere oflife still lower.51

In 1809, the Serampore missionaries founded The Benevolent Institution for Instructing theChildren of Indigent Christians, conceptualised as a central school from which to spread thesystem. The missionaries’ approach to the second problem they perceived, i.e. the ignorance ofthe “natives of India” was quite similar. The Hints Relative to Native Schools start with the mostvivid description of the “ignorance of the Hindoos” and its explanation in terms of a lack ofproper schools. The missionaries proceed to recommend the building of an elementary educationsystem in the vernacular languages as the “Remedy”. In the next step, they suggest the introduc-tion of the monitorial system as “the most effectual means of doing it” and count the time andmoney needed to extinguish Hinduism in the whole of India – as Joshua Marshman, the “educa-tionalist” of the Baptist missionaries of Serampore puts it again in a report to the Englishheadquarters: at the expense of just a rupee annually for each child “[l]et this principle … beacted upon for twenty or thirty years, and with a divine blessing, idolatry would be cut up by the

50Joseph Lancaster. The British System of Education: Being a Complete Epitome of the Improvements andInventions Practised at the Royal Free Schools, Borough-Road, Southwark (London: Royal Free School,1810).51W. Carey, J. Marshman and W. Ward. Report Relative to The “Benevolent Institution” at Calcutta(Serampore, 1812); BMS Archives, Angus Library, Oxford.

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roots”.52 Finally, they suggest building a non-governmental Institution for Native Schools as theagency to implement the plan – a suggestion they indeed realised within a year.

The actors involved with monitorial teaching can be described as modern social engineerswho shared a view of society as manageable and restructurable with the use of certain socialtechnologies, i.e. a set of knowledge-based measures that were supposed to govern the livingconditions of certain populations according to aims defined with regard to the common good ofsociety.53

From the point of view of “theorisation”, one can emphasise the similarities between theusers of the monitorial system as a crucial factor for its wide circulation and implementation.Information concerning educational efforts in general and the monitorial system in particularwas easily transmitted within the network that connected missionary and school societies all overthe empire. Moreover, and this was equally important, the experiences and suggestions of oneorganisation could serve as examples for others, because the rationality of the institutional form,the operations, the objectives and the structure of the reports were perceived as similar. Asmodern organisations they recognised each other as legitimate actors whose mode of activity, i.e.social engineering, could be understood and appreciated. Moreover, the BFSS activists inLondon and abroad, and the missionaries as well as the members of local school associations inIndia shared a belief in the building of education systems as a “cure” for a number of “socialillnesses” such as crime, “wickedness” and poverty.

The diffusion of useful knowledge

After looking at the general purpose ascribed to education – to promote the common good – andthe general approach to the management of social conditions, I want to focus now on the desiredeffects of monitorial schooling on its specific target groups and individuals belonging to thesegroups, i.e. lower class children of Madras, London and Calcutta as well as the rural “native”youth within the reach of the missionaries. Because education was seen as an instrument tosimultaneously empower and subject individuals, the standard curriculum in monitorial schoolsincluded reading, writing and accounting as a means for lower class children to earn a living, aswell as to acquire habits of order, discipline and industry.

While the general aim of popular instruction (i.e. to morally uplift the students and – in Bell’swords – “render” them “useful to themselves and society”) was agreed upon, the best extent andcontent of this instruction was highly controversial. Generally speaking, Lancaster’s supportersand the BFSS put more emphasis on the enabling dimension and the communication of as muchknowledge as possible, while Bell and the Church faction stressed the importance of maintainingsocial order and keeping the children of the poor in their place:

It is not proposed that the children of the poor be educated in an expensive manner, or even taughtto write and cypher. Utopian schemes, for the universal diffusion of general knowledge, would soonrealize the fable of the belly and the other members of the body, and confound, that the distinctionof ranks and classes of society, on which the general welfare hinges, and the happiness of the lowerorders, no less than that of the higher, depends. Parents will always be found to educate, at their ownexpense, children enough to fill the stations, which require higher qualifications; and there is a riskof elevating, by an indiscriminate education, the minds of those doomed to the drudgery of dailylabour, above their condition, and thereby rendering them discontented and unhappy in their lot. It

52Periodical Accounts, Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society XXXIII (1810–1812): 352–3.53This is one possibility to read the famous power/knowledge nexus of Michel Foucault’s in the contextof his historical sketches on institution-building and knowledge production connected to the making ofthe modern administrative state: Urs Lindner. “Alles Macht oder was? Foucault, Althusser und kritischeGesellschaftstheorie,” Prokla 145 (2006): 583–609.

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may suffice to teach the generality, on an economical plan, to read their bible and understand thedoctrines of the holy religion.54

The idea of “keep them in their place” but “make them useful” also shaped the policy towardsthe “Eurasians” and “natives” of India. The latter, for instance were not to be taught the Englishlanguage in the first place, because otherwise “they would … by their education be unfitted forthe ordinary stations of life”.55

The problem about the “Eurasians” was that they were meant to fill a certain space in colo-nial society: a mediating function between “European gentlemen” and indigenous servants.Hence, the aim of the Benevolent Institution of Calcutta was to make its students “comprehenddirections given them by English gentlemen, which their superior colloquial acquaintance withthe native language and idiom, enables them to convey to native servants with ease and effect”.56

However, the “Eurasian” children appeared totally unfit for that:

Were you to witness the state of these children as it respects their morals … I cannot help thinkingthat, notwithstanding your knowledge of human nature, you would be shocked. I do not believe thatchildren of their age, even in Constantinople, exceed them in lying, swearing, obscenity, resentment,accompanied by deep-rooted pride, and the obstinacy arising from the united idolatry and supersti-tion of heathen and catholics. All these vices are to be seen glaringly in children scarcely arrived atthe age of six years.57

Low-class Europeans in the colonies, of mixed or doubtful descent, were perceived as a dangerto British rule. Their existence threatened stable distinctions between “whiteness”, or “Europe-anness”, i.e. civilisation, and savage “blackness” and, thus, the problematic identity of Europeansin colonial contexts.58 Since their public visibility showed the limits of European superiority,workhouses and other such disciplinary institutions were designed in order to bring them undercontrol. Vagrants were also sometimes deported.59 Moreover, schools were installed to “rescue”the illegitimate offspring of European soldiers from the “corrupting influence” of their Indianmothers – such as the Military Orphan Asylum conducted by Andrew Bell in Madras. However,even if the end of that institution was to “giv[e] society an annual crop of good and usefulsubjects”,60 the project of educating the “Eurasians” also had a dimension of enabling individu-als: “To read and write English, and be conversant with English Accounts, is … in a multitudeof instances, the means of obtaining a livelihood; it is indeed nearly equivalent to giving a poorboy in England a trade of employment: it renders him useful to society while it preserves himfrom idleness and consequent vice…”.61

The grand objective of the Baptist and London missionaries with regard to the indigenousyouth, which was shared by the BFSS to a certain extent, was conversion. However, there weretwo major preconditions that had to be met beforehand. In the first place, the spread of the gospel

54Bell, Postscript to the 2nd edition of his Experiment, 1805. This statement must be read in the context ofa highly controversial debate. In fact, the schools promoted by the NES did teach Writing and Arithmetic.55Marshman, Hints Relative to Native Schools, 11.56Report of the Benevolent Institution, 1815, 4–6.57Leonard, teacher of the Benevolent Institution to Marshman, June 13, 1811. Periodical Accounts,XXXIII, 332.58Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Theresa Hubel. “In Search of the British Indian in BritishIndia: White Orphans, Kipling’s Kim, and Class in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004):227–51.59David Arnold. “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal ofImperial and Commonwealth History 7 (1979): 104–28.60Bell, Experiment, 7.61Report of the Benevolent Institution 1815, 13.

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simply required a literate readership.62 Moreover, missionaries perceived a close connectionbetween Hinduism and a lack of knowledge: “their system [of religion], tending to produce andperpetuate ignorance of the worst kind, and this ignorance, on the other hand, tending to add tothe horrors of the system”.63

Hence, the curriculum in schools targeting the “natives” had to be extended beyond the usualtraining in reading, writing and arithmetic. It integrated basic knowledge in Western science (forinstance, on the solar system), geography and history that were supposed to supplant the “super-stitious” notions of the Hindus regarding the composition of the world:

The first class in all the schools have committed to memory a small work on Eclipses, the figure andmotion of the Earth, and other interesting and important topics in Astronomy, which have a directbearing on the false and superstitious ideas which prevail among the heathen; and while many thingsregarded as ominous are traced to their natural courses, the learner is taught to observe and adore, inall, the wisdom and goodness of Him, “by whom all things” and to whom all the works of creationare designed to lead us.64

However, “native education” was not only an instrument of the “praeparatio evangelica”. It was,moreover, seen as generally promoting “civilisation” by strengthening individual subjectivity:

The British System [i.e. the monitorial system] is not only valuable as a method of communicatinginstruction to the children of the Heathen, but it is also of inestimable value in facilitating civiliza-tion…. Thus the rising generation at our Institution have a twofold advantage; while they are dailyreceiving Christian instruction, they are at the same time taught the necessity of submitting to eachother, and thereby they will be ultimately qualified to manage their own affairs.65

The diffusion of useful knowledge was meant to enable the “natives” “to claim … that freedomfrom oppression, which it is the desire of every enlightened government to grant”.66 The educa-tional projects display an ambiguity. On the one hand, the subaltern target groups of themonitorial system were to be subdued to the common good of society, as defined by the civilis-ing missionaries. Schools were used as a means to govern their personal conduct by teachingthem habits, morals and faculties which the educationalists defined as “useful”. On the otherhand, the schools indeed offered certain opportunities to individuals, especially in terms ofemployment. “Eurasian” alumni often became teachers and school inspectors, were employed asprinters, or petty clerks. As far as Hindu students are concerned the only information availableabout their further lives is that some became teachers as well and a small number were acceptedinto institutions of higher learning.

Before discussing the circulation of pedagogical knowledge within the British Empire,I want to comment briefly on a general strategy of the missionary and school societies towardsthe “diffusion” of education in India. The BFSS correspondents were convinced of a genuinely“diffusive character of the British System”67, which they tried to realise this by relying as much

62“It is proper to observe, that a general perusal of the Scriptures amongst the natives will beimpracticable till they are taught to read,” in “Memorandum on the Establishment of Native Schools byMr. Creighton,” Periodical Accounts XVIII (1806–1809): 445–51.63Marshman, Hints Relative to Native Schools, 7.64Edmund Crisp, stationed by the LMS in Combaconum, South India, in a letter to the BFSS. QuarterlyExtracts 35 (1835). Very similar ideas are expressed in Marshman’s Hints Relative to Native Schools,13–18.65A correspondent of the BFSS from the Cape of Good Hope about “Schools among the Hottentots,”Quarterly Extracts 20 (1831): 63.66Marshman, Hints Relative to Native Schools, 13.67Quarterly Extracts 19 (1831): 55.

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on “native” (and “Eurasian”) agency as possible. This shows in the numerous efforts to initiatelocal school societies and committees that were supposed to take over responsibility for schoolsin a defined area. Moreover, although missionaries founded schools on a large scale – theBaptists controlled over 100 schools in the region of Serampore, Robert May for the LMS initi-ated about 50 institutions around Chinsura, or Addis for the BFSS was responsible for more than30 schools in the Travancore area in South India – they always employed “native” teachers, oftenchosen from their own alumni. Thus, their own function was reduced to control, superintendenceand supply of materials. The monitorial system, with its engagement of students’ agency,appeared to be perfectly adapted to the idea of the so-called “downward filtration” of knowledge– i.e. to teach just some members among a large group and hope that they would further spreadwhat they had learned. The concept of “downward filtration” became the core element of theeducational policy of the Bengal government adopted after 1835.68

Colonial laboratories and metropolitan theorisation

In this last section, I am looking at the exchange of knowledge between the heart of the Empireand its most important colony: the transformation of local school experiences (in Madras) into astandardised model claiming universal adaptability (in London) as well as the re-implementationof that model (in the British Indian territories) and, finally, the communication of experienceswith that model back to London.

Although the history of the monitorial system of education in India has so far attracted littlescholarly attention – which is surprising considering the number of schools and school societiesthat have been using it – there was some discussion on its “Indian origins”. Thus, Nurullah andNaik, the authors of A Student’s History of Education in India, “point out with pride that the indig-enous schools of India contributed the idea of the monitorial system to England”. They emphasise“the great contribution which was made by India to the spread of education among the poorerclasses of England herself” – in opposition to historians of education who look only on England’sinfluence on India.69 Following Nurullah and Naik, the Swedish scholar Ingeborg Wilke70 triedreconstructing the roots of the Bell–Lancaster Method in “the Indian village school”. In this way,these authors revise the classical story of “Western” impact and Indian response.

However, it must be emphasised that the Eurocentric or modernist narratives cannot just be“turned around”. The case of the monitorial system clearly shows this: a variety of educationalideas and pedagogical practices – “European” and “Indian” – have been merged into a newhybrid model.71 Bell himself acknowledged that the inspiration to re-model his orphan schoolsprang from an encounter with a vernacular village school.72 He definitely adopted the methodof teaching the alphabet not by means of reading as was common in Western Europe, but by

68See Macauley’s famous “Minute on Indian Education” of February 2, 1835. In Macaulay, Prose andPoetry, selected by G.M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).69J.P. Naik and S. Nurullah. A Student’s History of Education in India,1800–1947 (Bombay: Macmillan,1955), 25.70Ingeborg Wilke. “Die Bell–Lancaster Methode und die indische Dorfschule aus dem Gesichtswinkel derkomparativen Pädagogik,” Pädagogische Rundschau 22 (1968): 352–68.71In recent literature on the History of Education in South Asia, scholars analysed the development ofhybrid novelties rather than the transplantation of European educational institutions to India. I think thatAndrew Bell’s “innovation” and the spread of monitorial teaching must be interpreted along the samelines. Harald Fischer-Tiné. Der Gurukul-Kangri oder die Erziehung der Arya-Nation: Kolonialismus,Hindureform und “nationale Bildung” in Britisch-Indien (1897–1922) (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003);Nita Kumar. Lessons from Schools: the History of Education in Benares (New Delhi: Sage Publications,2000).72R.C. Southey, Life of the Reverend Andrew Bell (London, 1844). 3 Vols. See Vol. 1, 173.

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means of writing letters in sand. However, even the idea of installing pupils as teachers mighthave been influenced by local practice, since forms of mutual instruction have been widespreadin this region, as the few sources suggest.73 However, there were a lot of other “influences” onBell – for example his close contacts with the German missionaries stationed at Tranquebar whoused a specific adaptation of August Hermann Francke’s pietistic pedagogy in their missionschools.74

Moreover, what spread around the world was not local practical pedagogical knowledge, buta specific modern form of model knowledge, a social technology, and, in institutionalist terms,a “theorised account”. Comparing subsequent editions of Bell’s and Lancaster’s writings, one cantrace this increasing “theorisation”. Whereas Bell’s initial report described his particular schoolin Madras, Lancaster illustrated his classroom experiments against the background of the educa-tion of the poor in early-nineteenth-century London. In the following publications, both Bell andLancaster increasingly standardised their methods and disconnected and abstracted them fromthe original settings. They incorporated the monitorial method into a wider system of elementaryschooling that was underpinned by a general theory of education as an instrument of individualand social improvement. Originally close descriptions of two experiments of a rather limited scopeevolved into a standard model that was easily accessible and whose claim could be described asfollows: anybody can teach any group of children – the larger, the better – anywhere in the worldwith the monitorial method, and the effects will always be the same. Bell and Lancaster thus devel-oped manuals that were easily accessible and appeared to contain everything a teacher needed toknow, from group psychology and teaching methods to school furniture and writing materials.

According to Meyer and Strang, “theorised accounts” not only formulate patterned relation-ships such as chains of cause and effect, they also include explanations about the characteristicsand advantages in terms of generally recognised values such as efficiency, or progress. Again,this is true for Bell and Lancaster, who specified the properties of their methods in a way thatincreasingly reflected utilitarian notions and particularly elaborated on aspects like rationality,economy and effectiveness.75

However, there are certain limitations to the institutionalist approach. Historical processes ofmodel building and spread must be placed in the context of colonial geography. Local knowl-edge was produced in contact with non-European societies, while the authoritative model wasdesigned in and promoted from London. Thus, it is not random, where processes of model“diffusion” start, but a question of global dominance structures. Moreover, institutional theorydoes not explain what happens to the universal models when they get implemented in localsettings – below the macro-level of trans- and international communication.

In the case of the monitorial system, a first transformation occurred when social engineersadopted it for their specific purposes, such as for instance, conversion: “You are aware”, arguedJoshua Marshman “that one part of the plan [the monitorial system] consists in dictating words,which a class of 50 or 100 may hear from the mouth of one, and learn to read, spell and write it,at the same time…. Why not this mode then, be improved, so as to give a youth a clear andsystematic knowledge of the word of God?”76

Second, there were a lot of obstacles obstructing the full or “true” implementation of themodel. Missionaries had to refine their aims in negotiation with the government and in the localschool societies. Living in constant fear of missionary activities possibly causing rebellion and

73Dharmpal, Beautiful Tree, 252–7; Gründler and Ziegenbalg, Malabarische Korrespondenz, 128, 137.74Heike Liebau. “Von Halle nach Madras. Pietistische Waisenhauspädagogik und englischeAppropriationen in Indien,” in Schriewer and Caruso, Nationalerziehung und Universalmethode.75Meyer and Strang, “Conditions”, 497.76Marshman, in Periodical Accounts XXXIII (1810–1812): 350.

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thus endangering the stability of British rule in India77 the Bengal government was anxious toensure that the missionaries’ educational “exertions [were] not directed to any interference in[the] religious opinions”78 of the “natives”. That meant no scriptural education in the schoolsthat were financially supported by the government, even if this was part of the monitorial modeland the interest of the British missionaries and educationalists who promoted it so strongly inIndia. Schools lost their funds when they did not follow this rule. The bhadralok active in theCSBS had their own interests as well and thus, for instance, refused to finance the building of alocal system of schools for girls, managed by a female missionary trained at “Borough Road”and sent out by the BFSS.79

Another transformation occurred on the micro-level, when the model was actually imple-mented. The schools were a field of conflict, where “native” teachers did not obey the rules oftheir European superintendents, “lied” to them, and troubled them with “general negligence” and“bad conduct”.80 Moreover, there was no means to ensure that the target group was affectedin the way desired. On the one hand, as Robert May had to admit, “the Children are in somedegree to follow their own inclination whether they will attend School or not”.81 And on theother hand, even if they attended the schools and participated in the lessons it was impossibleto control the outcome. Students “appear[ed] to feel very little interest in the glorious truthsthey daily commit to memory”82 and used the schools just to acquire English-language skills.Thus, even missionary sources point at the limits to model implementation and, therefore, alsoto social engineering.

Now, to leave India and come to the last point, what kind of knowledge was it that travelledback to England? Reports about experiences with Indian practices and British encounters withthem were regularly communicated to a British audience. Bell published an account of hisMadras experiments in London and this, later, inspired the formation of the authoritative model.Moreover, the Bengal experiments of missionary societies received prominent attention inEngland. James Mill, well known as a leading utilitarian theoretician and author of the influentialHistory of British India, took an active part in the debate on national education in the firstdecades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand he strongly argued in favour of the monitorialsystem at home and supported it as a member of a local Lancasterian association.83 On the otherhand he recommended the concepts of the Baptist missionaries in Bengal, published in the HintsRelative to Native Schools: “We mention with extraordinary satisfaction that an idea of educa-tion, hardly less extensive than what is here alluded to, has been adopted by the enlightened andindefatigable class of men, the Baptist missionaries in India, for the population, poor as well as

77Until William Wilberforce, supported by a powerful lobby, enforced the insertion of the so-called“pious clauses” into the charter of the East India Company in 1813, missionaries were not even allowed tosettle in the British territories. They had to side-step to “native” states, or, to the territories of otherEuropeans; for instance, the Baptist missionaries went to Serampore, a Danish possession.78This is a constant topos in the correspondence between the Bengal Government and the Court ofDirectors in London regarding the schools of Robert May (LMS). See Reports Connected with the NativeFree Schools at Chinsurah Under the Superintendence of Mr. May. India Office Records: F/4/605/15020.79George F. Bartle. “The Role of the British and Foreign School Society in Elementary Education in Indiaand the East Indies 1813–1875,” History of Education 23 (1994): 17–33.80Reports Connected with the Native Free Schools at Chinsurah.81Report from Robert May, July 4, 1815, in Reports Connected with the Native Free Schools atChinsurah.82Letter by Revd Addis, stationed at Tranvancore, to the BFSS, in Quaterly Extracts 16 (1830): 31–2.83James Mill. Schools for All, in Preference to School for Churchmen Only: or, the State of theControversy Between the Advocates for the Lancasterian System of Universal Education, and Those, whoHave Set up an Exclusive and Partial System Under the Name of the Church and Dr. Bell. London, 1812;reprint ed. Jeffrey Stern (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995).

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ignorant, of those extensive and populous regions”. He included a section from the Hints in hisarticle on education in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, concluding: “Why should not the sameidea be pursued in England, and as much knowledge conveyed to the youth of all classes atschool, as the knowledge of the age, and the allotted period of schooling will admit?”84

John Foster, who presented a sketch of his Essay at an annual meeting of the BFSS – andthus emphasised the zeal of that organisation – may stand here as a another example of the recep-tion of the Indian experience. In the second edition of that essay, he described at length theemployment of the monitorial system by the missionaries in Bengal as a lesson to profit by.85 Inthat way, missionaries’ Indian activities were used as a reference in debates about nationaleducation in England.

How can these knowledge flows to England be interpreted? At first sight, they seem toconfirm an argument quite common in postcolonial debates, saying that the colonies functionedas a kind of laboratory for the development of institutions and policies before they were imple-mented in the metropole.86 Indeed, there was a window of opportunity for English administratorsand civil society actors, as Eric Stokes has shown.87 What is more, information about colonialexperiments was used in England. However, there are certain limitations also to this idea. First,one cannot – as the term “laboratory” implies – assume that there was an intention to test. Belldid not go to India to see if his ideas about rational classroom management would work. Whenhe published his Experiment in 1797, he did not even know if his innovation would be applicableto England: “Whether a similar attempt would be attended with equal success in every charity orfree school, I do not say”. Second, the exchange of knowledge between England and India seemsto have been much more complex, as the references to the missionary activities in Bengal thatwere already outcomes of using a model “diffusing” from England have shown. Also the firsteducational dispatch of the East India Company’s Court of Directors in 1814 points to thiscomplexity. The document recommended the promotion of the monitorial system of educationin order to improve the quality of prevalent indigenous schools in India and thereby referred toboth the Indian “origin” of the model and its successful implementation in England:

The mode of instruction that from time immemorial has been practised [in India] has received thehighest tribute of praise by its adoption in this country [i.e. in England], under the direction of theReverend Dr. Bell, formerly Chaplain at Madras; and it is now become the mode by which educationis conducted in our national establishments, from a conviction of the facility it affords in theacquisition of language by simplifying the process of instruction. This venerable and benevolentinstitution of the Hindoos [sic] is represented to have withstood the stock of revolutions, and to itsoperation is ascribed the general intelligence of the people as scribes and accountants.

Finally, the reports about educational experiences in the colonies did not only offer valuableinformation about how schooling can be organised. Reports of successful activities were intrin-sically tied to the legitimisation of the organisations operating from England. Beside encourag-ing and motivating activists and teacher candidates, the existence of organisations such as theBFSS and missionary societies rested on the support of a sympathetic public. This also had amaterial component: dependent on private donations and subscriptions, the BFSS needed toshow its sponsors that their money was not spent in vain. One can trace from the correspondence

84James Mill. The Article Education, Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1824 (reprint byRoutledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993), 40–1.85Foster, Evils of Popular Ignorance, 2nd ed. 1820, 297–8.86Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest; S. Hofkosh and A. Richardson, eds. Romanticism, Race, and ImperialCulture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Gyan Prakash. Another Reason.Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).87Stokes, Utilitarians.

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of the BFSS, which they regularly published in extracts, how the activists abroad constantly referto “encouraging” experiences proving, first, that there is an increasing “desire” of the “natives”for education and even for gospel lessons; second, they describe the horrible moral conditions ofthe “destitute” boys that would have persisted without their educational efforts.88 Third, BFSScorrespondents represented themselves as instruments of divine providence. The successful“improvement” of the students and the willingness of some of them and their parents to read thegospel proved that the missionaries were on the right path to incorporate India into the kingdomof God. The crucial point, however, was that although “savages” and “heathens” were imaginedas living in a state of absolute moral corruption they could be rescued. Thus, the British publicwas called responsible for one or the other, their salvation or perdition. As an “Address to theFriends of Missions” by the BMS put it:

Christian females of every rank and class! … The condition of women in India seems peculiarly tocall on British Females to come to their aid. Left in complete ignorance, secluded from society,treated rather as the slaves than as the companions of their husbands, their lives are a blank andjoyless waste; and at last many of them expire on the funeral pile, the flames of which are kindled,perhaps, by their own children! And yet these hopeless mortals are as capable of receiving instruc-tion, of enjoying the pleasures of social intercourse, of cherishing the feelings of conjugal and paren-tal affection, as the wives and mothers and daughters of England are! Surely then you will not sufferthem to proceed in this course of degradation and wretchedness, without making a single effort torelieve them.89

Conclusion

Looking at the story of the creation and spread of the monitorial system of education, one cansee how developments in Britain and its first Eastern colony had already become interconnectedat the beginning of the nineteenth century. The building of the British Empire and the extensionof colonial rule had opened a real as well as a symbolic space for networks of civil societyconcerned with social reform and Christianisation. The early-nineteenth-century civilisingmissionaries targeted not only the poor of England but also the “Eurasian” and “native” popula-tions abroad, while both civilising missions legitimised each other. As the low-class English hadto be reformed in order not to conduct themselves like “savages”, the “heathens” were to berescued from perdition because English philanthropy had already shown its generosity by takingcare of “the poor”.

Inspired by the widespread belief in the powers of education to improve both, society as wellas individuals, educational activists gathered in a number of non-governmental organisations –among whom the BFSS proved most influential. Protestant missionary societies also becameactive in the field of popular education. They saw it as a means to prepare Indian society forevangelisation. The monitorial system of education attracted social reformers, British as well asIndian, and missionaries as a civilising technology, a rational instrument to morally uplift.

The emergence of an organisational network of social reformers connecting Britain andIndia, as well as the development and circulation of disciplinary techniques, took place in thecontext of the making of an imperial social formation that brought about new actors and framedtheir actions and ideas at home as well as in the colony.

Thus, outside the sphere of the state and sometimes in conflict with government officials,social reformers participated in colonial rule, trying to manage the conditions and conduct of thenew British subjects. However, it was a kind of domination that targeted parts of the English

88Correspondents of the BFSS in South India, 1830–1842, cited in the Quaterly Extracts.89The Annual Report of the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society etc. (London: J. Haddon, 1820), 45.

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population as well. Of course, there was a certain ambiguity in the educational projects. Theoperators of schools at least claimed to empower students to make a living, to manage their ownaffairs and to claim protection against oppression. Moreover, they were not able to control whatstudents took from the schools for themselves.

Regarding the issue of knowledge transfer within the British Empire, it can be summarisedthat the monitorial system was at least of a double “origin”: in a colonial hybrid setting as wellas in the very metropolis. Later, monitorial teaching was transformed into a theorised account inLondon, and implemented again in India – as far as models can be implemented in local situa-tions of negotiation and conflict. Finally, experiences with this implementation were communi-cated back to London. As far as one can reduce these complex communication flows into a shortformula, it might be said that India provided ample information as well as legitimisation of actorsand practices, while guidelines and experts came from London.

Notes on contributorJana Tschurenev is a research fellow in the working group “National Education and Universal Method”,funded by the German Research Council, at the Comparative Education Centre, Humboldt UniversityBerlin. With a background in modern history and area studies in India and Eastern/South-EasternEurope, she is also now a PhD candidate at Humboldt University. Her general concerns are postcolonialperspectives on the history of education, in particular the development of modern educational institutionsunder colonial conditions and the interaction of “Western” and “indigenous” forms of pedagogical andeducational knowledge.

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