Intro

Who invented first grade? Or second and third for that matter? Someone had to. Someone had to decide that it was a good idea to put all of the kids of the same age in one room and have one person teach them for a year before passing them on. But why? Today, story of the rise and fall of school system from the past that did things completely differently . . .  why almost nobody has heard of it today  . . . and what we have to learn from this almost forgotten experiment. This is the story of Andrew Bell and his Madras schools. You’re listening to I Heart This. I’m Ben Lord. Let’s talk about what we love. 

Problem

“If I didn’t have to do so many worksheets and poster projects, I could actually be learning something.” 

That’s what my daughter, Eva, said when I asked how one of her high school classes were going. Now, there are definitely kids who show off how ‘bored’ they are in class because they’re so much more advanced than those juvenile high school classes. But Eva wasn’t showing off or complaining. I’ve never once heard her speak ill of a classmate or a teacher. Eva is just curious. She just really Loves. To. Learn. The classes that she likes best are the ones where she says can feel herself learning. She knows that’s what school is for. And when she gets frustrated by school, it is because school falls short of that promise … like, a lot. 

That happens because school isn’t made for Eva. It’s made for another kid . . . a kid who isn’t quite so curious or motivated . . . a kid who mostly sees learning as work and who needs grades as incentives to get that work done . . . a kid who, because they’re not really asking their own questions,  needs a teacher to ask for them and then needs highly-structured “assignments” to funnel their energy toward an answer. 

There’s nothing wrong with being that kind of kid. It’s just not who Eva is. And, I’m sure you know, she’s not the only one. 

I’ve spent much of my life on the other side of the worksheet . . . as a teacher . . . and I’ve watched kids like Eva, politely sitting through class, feeling like the pace was ponderously slow. For these kids, school actually seems to slow down their learning. Like, if these kids had played hooky in the library they could have and probably would have learned more. 

And, frankly, it’s a lot of kids. By my very unscientific measurement, I’d say it’s about one kid in five. 

This was as frustrating for me as a teacher as it was for my students. I wished I could have loosened the criteria, increased the challenge, or picked up the pace. But that was really hard to do. 

Because sitting right next to the Eva’s of the world, in that same class, were all the students that school actually was built for–ones who really did better at a steady pace, with highly constrained assignments and all these built-in incentives for getting the work done. 

And what made it hardest of all was that there were also in nearly the opposite circumstance as Eva. Sometimes it was because they’re nervous system just worked differently than the average person in a way that made it hard for them to read or remember or concentrate like other people. Sometimes it was because somewhere along the line, they had just missed something critical and fallen behind. Sometimes it was because there were hard things happening outside of school which meant they couldn’t sleep or do homework. Whatever the reasons, school had measured them and found them wanting. And they knew it. 

I’ve had tenth graders reading with the same reading fluency as the average third or fourth grade kid. These kids were way more frustrated than Eva. It’s hard to want to learn when the institution that is supposed to help you do it, constantly sends you the message that you suck at it. 

And this, for a teacher, is the most frustrating  . . . and heartbreaking . . . thing of all. 

Teaching, at least for me, was impossible. I’m fairly certain that I was a pretty good teacher, but it almost killed me. It consumed almost every waking moment, had me working almost every weekend and well into the night. It once prompted my wife to tell me that if I didn’t go into therapy, she was going to have to. So when educational reformers come in and suggest that the solution to this problem is that teachers should differentiate by having several different versions of every lesson, tailored to their various levels, backgrounds, and abilities . . . let’s just say that I didn’t feel seen or respected. What! Do you think if I had the capacity to do that, I wouldn’t have done it already? 

The problem wasn’t the students . . . but it wasn’t the teachers either . . . most of us were doing the best we could at a Herculean job. The problem was school itself. 

Look, the modern institution of school, pretty much all over the world,  is set up like an assembly line. The raw materials are some five-year-old kids. We put them onto the conveyor belt in kindergarten and then, about thirteen years later, they come out the other end of the factory . . . uh, school . . . supposedly as a fully functioning economy widget. Except when they don’t. And sometimes, even when they do, they feel like that assembly line has held them back. 

But why? Why is school that way? And can we, somehow, change it? 

Bell & The Madras School

The truth is that schools don’t have to be this way. And the world may have forgotten this . . . but they almost weren’t. The enterprise of modern education almost began on a completely different set of principles. And the story of how that path was forsaken has profound implications for Eva and me and teachers and students all over the world. Today, I want to tell you that story. 

The year is 1789. The place is British colonial India. An Anglican priest named Andrew Bell has recently arrived in the city of Madras (now Chennai). Bell is an entertaining speaker who has studied all the latest science, and he has made a name for himself as lecturer, demonstrating things like electricity and hot-air balloons and artificial ice. Kind of an local, eighteenth-century Bill Nye. He’s also become chaplain for several regiments of the British army, a cushy job with few responsibilities and a generous paycheck. 

And it seems Bell is an ambitious and energetic man, because, in 1789, he takes on yet another job . . . superintendent of an orphanage. 

This orphanage is called the Male Orphan Asylum. And it’s run by East India Company out of a crumbling old military fort scarred by the explosions of stored gunpowder. When Bell arrives, he finds the 20-or-so orphans housed there underclothed, underfed, and infected with parasites and measles. 

The orphans are not necessarily there voluntarily. They are children of Indian women and British soldiers whose fathers either can’t or won’t support them. These boys are often forcibly removed from their Indian families.

Whatever complicity Bell has in this traumatic family separation, by all accounts, he cares deeply and genuinely for “his” boys once they are in his keeping. He even turns down the salary the East India Company offers him. Under him, the orphanage expands rapidly. 

First, he addresses the most pressing needs: hygiene, nutritious means, clean bedding, adequate clothes, and inoculation against smallpox. But once these are sorted, he turns his attention to schooling. As you might expect, the orphanage runs on a shoestring. Other than Bell, who, technically, is a volunteer, it only has three employees, a headmaster and two assistant teachers. And Bell thinks they are absolutely terrible teachers. He tries to hire better ones, but whenever he does they leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere. The ones who stay seem totally incompetent. And they are badly outnumbered. The orphanage has grown to about two hundred boys. That’s a class of one hundred for each abysmal teacher. 

Bell ruminates on this problem one morning on a thoughtful ride along the beach, when he encounters a group of children scratching in the sand. Upon closer inspection, he sees that they are scratching letters. The older children are teaching the younger ones to read and write. 

Bell probably has no idea, but he has stumbled into a traditional open-air temple school. But whether he does or not, this simple observation inspires him to revelation. In an Archimedes-like moment of Eureka, he turns his horse back to the Asylum at a gallop. 

Immediately, Bell upends the orphans’ school. Instead of workbooks, which the orphanage couldn’t afford anyway, he gives his youngest students trays of wet sand. Now, they have a cheap, eraseable, endlessly reusable surface to practice their letters on, just like the kids on the beach.

But more importantly, Bell sees how to solve his staffing problem. He recruits expert students as tutors for the novices. The school will teach itself. 

To the modern ear, this sounds preposterous. But it works. It becomes a whole system of instruction. Bell organizes the boys into different classes, not by age, which wouldn’t make any sense since boys at all different ages are at all different levels. Some twelve year old can’t read at all while some nine year olds can. Instead, Bell organizes them by how much reading or writing they can already do. In each class a skilled boy becomes the teacher. And he teaches the other boys what he’s already learned but what they haven’t yet. As boys master the skill they take over the class, and the old teacher gets to graduate into the next level. 

This is not an assembly line. The boys advance at their own pace. They get to work on a skill as long as it takes them to master it and get to progress as quickly as they’re able provided that they share what they know along the way. 

We know a lot more about how people learn than people did in the 1700s. And a lot of the successes of Bell’s system make sense in terms of what we know now, and it succeeds at several things that our modern schools often fail at. Here are four examples:

1. Bell noticed that tutors actually got a lot out of teaching. Today, we would say it forced them to more actively process the new knowledge. This led them to better consolidate the knowledge in their long-term memories, and it gave them the kind of unpredictable practice that helped them transfer their knowledge to new situations. It turns out, trying to explain something so clearly that a novice can understand it is one of the best ways to understand difficult ideas. Today, cognitive scientists and YouTube productivity influences both advocate for this study technique under the name the Feynman Technique after the Nobel-prizewinning physicist. 

2. Second, Bell noticed that the frequent, low-stakes opportunities to advance were highly motivating. It was like levels in a video game. Becoming a tutor was a point of pride, a visible symbol that one had accomplished something worthy of esteem. 

3. Third, Bell also noticed something that wouldn’t really be taken seriously in educational circles for another two centuries. Boys who had just mastered something were often better at teaching the skill than expert adults were. Now, people often call it the “curse of knowledge.”  Basically, when you’re an expert, it’s hard to remember the difficulties of what you’ve already learned. 

4. Fourth and most importantly, the flexible self-pacing meant that nobody had to flounder in a class that we way over their head. In today’s world, so used to the educational assembly line, being “held back a grade” is such a scarlet letter of shame that many schools won’t even do it anymore. But in Bell’s school, there was little stigma. All the classes were mixed-aged. Everyone could move at their own pace, without embarrassment. 

Whatever the causes, Bell’s experiments in schooling were a resounding success. So much so that people from local mothers to British officers begged him to admit their kids. “This,” he wrote, “I consider as the best commendation of the Asylum.”

Rise and Fall of the Madras System

After seven years in India, Bell’s health begins to decline, and he returns home to convalescence. He plans to go back to India, but he never does. 

Instead, he writes with zeal about his experiments in education. He has a thousand copies of his book printed and passes them out to everyone he can. He must be persuasive, because Madras-style schools spread all over Britain. At the time, school is a privilege available only to the wealthy; about 10% of children regularly attend school, but there is a growing sentiment in philanthropic and religious circles that this ought to change. And in Bell’s cost-effective approach they see education’s future. Powerful charitable organizations take up the approach and spread it throughout the empire: Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa, the Pacific. His colleague and rival, Joseph Lancaster spreads it throughout the Americas, including the United States. At its height in the 1830s, it seems as if Bell’s approach might become the future of education. 

But, it doesn’t . . . It doesn’t. 

Why not? What happened to all those schools? Why do we end up with the conveyor belt instead? Why is it that hardly anyone has heard of Bell today? 

The truth is  . . . it’s complicated. And as I’ve researched it for this episode, I’ve been truly surprised by what I’ve learned. 

The Factory School

In 1837, a few years after Bell’s death, a state senator named Horace Mann was appointed to become the first Secretary of Education in Massachusetts. 

Massachusetts was already one of the world’s best educated places. Its protestant founders strongly believed that everyone should be able to read the Bible for themselves. So pretty much every community for the last two hundred years had supported a school that taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. 

For his part, Horace was an abolitionist and reformer. The idea that everybody can and should go to school was generations away, but Horace was one of its first proponents. And whether he intended to or not, he would influence the trajectory of free education, not just for Massachusetts, but for the entire world. Mann visited every school in Massachusetts. He also travelled to Europe to tour schools there and was particularly impressed with the national, free school system in the kingdom of Prussia. 

In a popular TED Talk on this subject, Sir Ken Robinson describes the schooling that Mann championed (even if he didn’t attribute it to him, in particular.) And in this model, the school is like a factory. The worker was the teacher, standing in one place . . . one classroom  . . . as the product, the student, came down the conveyor belt ready to be stamped with the particular bits of knowledge prescribed for a given grade. 

Under Horace’s leadership, a system of universal, tuition-free, taxpayer-funded, co-educational public schools opened and then became compulsory in the state by 1852. To provide the necessary workforce, he established a system of teacher training institutions called normal schools to train women (and pretty much just women) to be teachers. 

Like the Prussian schools he admired, these schools would be secular but still, of course, steeped in good Protestant morality and monitored to allow a good degree of control, to ensure that young minds were being correctly molded. 

That’s the origin story of factory-style education, but here’s where it gets really surprising to me. Horace Mann knew about Bell’s approach to education. Schools like Bell’s were widespread and had been energetically implemented in New York and Philadelphia. And while Horace admired some things about them, he rejected the approach because . . . get this . . . they were too factory-like. 

That’s right! Mann and the reformers of his day thought that the schools run by Bell and Lancaster relied too much on rote memorization, were too regimented. They were worried that while they might teach certain skills, they wouldn’t teach kids to really think. 

What the heck? When I began to read these critiques, I realized something was up with my understanding about how the whole history of school went down.  

Mann and company had a point. The schools that Joseph Lancaster had set up were mostly held in giant warehouses. They literally were factories. The curriculum was rigid. The outcomes were not as rosy as advertised. It turns out that, if you can afford it, having the help of an expert teacher really is better than having to rely on your peers alone. And in Lancaster’s system, the discipline was downright abusive. Bell had been adamantly opposed to corporal punishment, having been traumatized by harsh punishments he’d endured as a student himself. But Lancaster seemed to delight in sadistic creativity.

The more I read of Mann’s writing, the less I was able to justify thinking that he intended to set up a school based on a factory model. He didn’t intend for schools to look like an assembly line at all. Mostly, what he wanted was to spread the idea that everyone should get to go to school. And in order to put well-trained, highly qualified teachers in every classroom, there had to be some kind of structure. If he ended up making a different kind of educational factory, it seems to have been by accident. 

 If people were excited about industrial-style schools . . . well, it wasn’t so far off from the squeals of delight from modern tech bros about chromebooks in the classroom or video games that teach math. Just like today, people wanted to automate menial tasks and free teachers up for the real work of deep learning. Streamline education enough and you could bring it, affordably, to everyone in the same way that factories made clothes that everyone could afford. 

And they were right. Packaging education into grade levels and classrooms brought schools to almost every child in every country in the world. For all their flaws, these schools taught the world to read. 

Conclusion

This is not where I expected this episode to go. When I started researching, I thought I’d figure out where assembly line schools came from. And now, I’m not sure anyone tried to set up assembly line schools at all. Instead of a conspiracy to train children to comply, I found ongoing debates about what school is for and how much of it people could afford to provide. 

Even before public schools were a thing, people were arguing about what they should be like. Yes, there was plenty of racist bullshit . . . like our schools should make sure that those dirty immigrants embrace Anglo-American culture. Other people wanted to make sure that, even in secular schools, everyone got steeped in protestant Christian values, a move that really ticked off the Catholics who decided to open their own system of schools. Some people wanted to mold a compliant workforce. And others wanted to develop a spirit of free inquiry and democratic ideals. None of this should be surprising. You can find people who still want those same things today. 

The way I understand it now, the school system has never really been one big thing. Right from the beginning, people experimented–from Bell’s Madras system to Mann’s “common schools,” from Catholic schools to the one-room village schoolhouse. Everywhere, people tried to solve problems they saw with the resources they had, just as they have in everything else. 

But, the critique that started this essay still stands. In most of today’s schools, some students are trammeled as their age-level grade leaves them in the dust. And some are held back. Those complaints are real. And the structures of school that we’ve inherited, really do perpetuate them. 

In my lifetime and in my country, there’s been a sense that there’s something wrong with our schools. That they are failing. That they are broken. That kids are being left behind. And while this is true, by looking back at the history, it’s obvious that this is nothing new. 

Schools have always left kids behind. Often on purpose. Lots of kids weren’t even allowed in school because they weren’t white or because they weren’t boys. But even in school, kids got left behind because teachers didn’t know that dyslexia or ADHD existed, much less how to help students with them. Even in my parents’ generation, nobody accommodated learning disabilities or differences. If you had one, you just struggled through. And even for neurotypical white boys, if you weren’t good at recitations or learning from lectures, you were out of luck, cuz  . . . that was pretty much all they had.  

It’s not true that more kids slip through the cracks these days. What’s true is that, these days, we’re less tolerant of it. We’ve raised the bar on what schools are supposed to do. These days, finally, we’re asking schools to teach all the things to . . . every single kid. 

So . . . no  . . . schools aren’t broken. We’re just asking them to do something they’ve never had to do before. And … damn . . . look at all the progress we’ve made.

First, schools treat kids a lot more like human beings. They don’t hit kids anymore. And students have rights to expression and due process. Punishments are less severe and consequences are more constructive than ever.

Second, schools are way more fair. In the 1990s, for the first time in history, women graduated college at the same rate as men. However much Eva gets frustrated by busy work, she never complains about colleges or fields of study that are off-limits to her because she’s a girl. She just assumes that education is her right. Thanks, Title IX! And actually, right now, educational attainment among women has outpaced that of men, putting us in the unique position of having to think about removing educational barriers for them. While the gap in educational outcomes between races is much more stubborn, even there, significant progress has been made since the 1970s. 

For generations we’d assumed that people would always fall off the education conveyor belt. Some kids just didn’t have the smarts, we guessed. So, instead, schools spent a great deal of time trying to sort the haves from the have-nots. They fast-tracking some to honors classes and sent them off to college and let others serve out their time in remedial ones. School became a sorting machine. But that is much less true these days. Now, when schools find struggling kids, they pour tons of energy into helping them get back on track. We have laws that demand that schools accommodate kids’ with disabilities. We have teachers whose whole job is to identify kids that need extra help, give it to them, and then send them on their way all caught up. In my job now, I have seen schools taking middle school kids whose learning disabilities are so severe that even with daily intensive instruction, they are reading at a third grade level, but who continue to push them forward, and make real gains. These are kids who, even a few decades ago would have been written off. These teachers are changing that kid’s life. 

Across every expectation, school have risen. From a time when it was a privilege just to go to school, where most kids barely learned to do a cursory job of reading and writing, to a time when ninety percent graduate high school, 40% have college degrees, and we’re not worried that people have access to school, we’re worried about how good that school is. I’d say that’s a good problem to have. 

Bell’s story reminds me that schools aren’t stuck in an industrial model. They never were. They’ve been innovating from the beginning, they’re innovating now more than ever, and that they have made enormous progress. If school’s were a conveyor belt, it’s because that’s what we could manage at the time. They are re-tooling and sometimes completely ditching the assembly line all the time. For her part, Eva is doing an independent study next semester on clothing in medieval Europe. And last summer, with the blessing and assistance of the math department. Neither of those things would have been available in my high school in the early 1990s. She is the beneficiary of a growing flexibility in schools.

That progress may be too slow for my taste, and it may not be linear, but looking back, I see that schools are the best they’ve ever been for the greatest number of students. If we, rightly, dream of going farther, it’s because we’ve been emboldened by how far we’ve come. 

Outro

Hey, friends, if you’ve enjoyed this episode of I Heart This, would you do one small thing to support it. Go to our YouTube channel, the link is in the show notes, and click the subscribe button. That’s it. Even if you never watch or listen to any of our videos on YouTube. Even if you never return to our YouTube page, your little click will feed the algorithm that helps other people find us. Each episode of I Heart This takes between 25 and 75 hours to produce. You can help make that work matter in just 25 seconds.  

And thanks. 

I Heart This is written, edited, and produced by me, Ben Lord. Our logo was designed by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Email us at iheartthispodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening. And, as always, Be kind. Be curious, and be thankful. 

References

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Lancaster, J. (1932). The Practical Parts of Lancaster’s Improvements and Bell’s Experiment. Cambridge University Press. https://constitution.org/1-Education/lanc/practical.htm

Sarma, S. E., & Yoquinto, L. (2020). Grasp : The science transforming how we learn. Doubleday.

Sheposh, R. (2022). Monitorial system (education) | EBSCO. EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | Www.ebsco.com. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/education/monitorial-system-education

Snyder, T. D. (1993). 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait. National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf

Southey, R., & Southey, C. C. (1844). The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell. John Murray. https://archive.org/details/lifeofrevandrewb02sout/page/n1/mode/2up

TED. (2007). Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&t=2s

Watters, A. (2015, April 25). The invented history of “the factory model of education.” Medium; The History of the Future of Education. https://medium.com/the-history-of-the-future-of-education/the-invented-history-of-the-factory-model-of-education-a069ae3d1e99

Wikipedia Contributors. (2025, March 8). Racial achievement gap in the United States. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_United_States