Coleridge and Wordsworth were more than just poets: they were deeply concerned about children’s education. A.S. Byatt’s Unruly Times Pub Vintage 1977 gives a vivid account of an experiment on the teaching of ‘letters’ over nealy two hundred years ago. An early example of literally ’embodied’ experience.

Another reason for the poets’ (Coleridge and Wordsworth) approval of Dr Bell’s Madras system was that Bell believed that schools should be Church controlled , whilst his great rival Joseph Lancaster, the Quaker believed in ‘free education on general Christian principles’. This battle between the Established Church and Dissent contributed in the delay of any plans for State education for two generations.

Southey’s New System of Education is sharply mocking about Lancaster, both as an ‘experimental’ teacher and as a theorist about the nature of children. Dr Bell in Military Male Orphanage had taught children to write, economically, by getting them to trace letters in a tray of sand. Lancaster also introduced this innovation but used wet sand and skewers instead of dry sand and fingers. He result was messy, heavy and awkward. The sand ‘required great care in wetting: if wetted either too much or too little it was equally useless and inconvenient’. When Dr Bell told him it should be dry sand, Lancaster remarked that this fully showed ‘how essential a minute detail is to the ready practice of any experiment’.