Scottish clergyman who developed popular education by the method of supervised mutual teaching among students.

Bell graduated from the University of St. Andrews and went as a tutor to Virginia in colonial North America, where, in addition to teaching, he made a small fortune trading tobacco. He returned to Great Britain in 1781 and continued tutoring at St. Andrews but sought ordination in the Church of England, which he received in 1785. In 1787 he went to Madras, India, where he introduced into an orphan school a “monitorial (monitorial system)” plan that overcame a shortage of teachers by having the better pupils instruct those who were younger or struggling. On his return to London he published a description of his Madras system in An Experiment in Education (1797), but his ideas had little popularity in England until they were adapted by Joseph Lancaster (Lancaster, Joseph) in a school opened at Southwark in 1801 and by Robert Owen (Owen, Robert) in New Lanark, Scotland. (See monitorial system.) Meanwhile, Bell was made rector of Swanage, Dorset, in 1801. In 1811 he became superintendent of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, a society formed to help check the rapid spread of nondenominational schools organized by Lancaster. Bell was also named master of Sherburn Hospital, Durham (1809), canon of Hereford Cathedral (1818), and prebend of Westminster (1819). At his death he left a large endowment for Scottish educational projects, which included funds for constructing a school in St. Andrews and for establishing chaired professorships in education at the University of Edinburgh and the University of St. Andrews. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Bell was born in Edinburgh and lived there all his life. He began work humbly by “engraving letters, names, and crests on gentlemen's plate, dog's collars and so forth.” He was never greatly admired as an engraver, and many of his plates for the first, second, and third editions of the Britannica, and for William Smellie's translation of the Count de Buffon's Natural History (1781 et seq.), are more highly regarded today than in his own time. How the arrangement between Bell and Macfarquhar to produce an encyclopaedia was made is not known; but it was Bell who wrote to William Smellie to engage his services as compiler of the first edition (1768–71), and his interest in the publication never flagged. He shared proprietorship with Macfarquhar, and in 1793, after Macfarquhar's death, he became sole proprietor.