Coleridge’s views on education are best seen in the lecture On Education reproduced here (item 65) and in Coleridge on Logic and Learning, edited by A. D. Snyder. There are other references in the Friend and in the letters and the Table Talk. He knew of the work of Pestalozzi on the continent, and in keeping with his dynamic theory of personality, believed in the education of the child first and the teaching of subjects second. His views sound radical enough in some quarters even now. He was interested in the learning process in children; he notes for example the difficulty for a child in ‘our lying alphabet’, in which the name of a letter does not correspond to the sound: BALL should be Beeāellell. Interest in education became acutely controversial in his day in the rivalry between the Bell and Lancaster schemes for national education. The principles of the two were similar as to educational methods, but the system of Dr. Bell had the support of the Church of England, and in particular of Coleridge’s friend the Bishop of Durham, and that was the side he took. The Lancaster party was largely nonconformist and Whig. Progressive in his theories so far as the methods of education of the individual went, he was conservative in his view of its social operation, believing that national education should be in the control of the church, and should proceed by a filtering process from the learned few downwards.