In these chapters, she reads the poem closely and carefully, incorporating into her argument much historical detail and much historicist criticism. In this respect, the book is almost a manifesto. It is to Hickey's credit that she never lets it become one. Hickey's argument builds upon Richardson's thesis and modifies it in important ways. Wordsworth was initially an enthusiastic supporter of Bell's system, a matter that has caused some consternation among scholars.
Hickey takes a different tack.
According to Wordsworth, the problem with most of the new educational methods is that they impart knowledge, but only by centralizing power in a controlling authority and thereby reducing imaginative power, sometimes severely. Children become not children but miniature adults, and Wordsworth's later revision of this passage, comparing such children to oriental bonsai, is apt. In Bell's system, however, authority was diffused among a hierarchy of tutors and overseers, and thus it seemed to Wordsworth, at the time he wrote The Excursion , to offer the possibility of increased knowledge without damage to the developing power of imagination. The Wanderer praises Bell, and the Wordsworths themselves instituted his system at the Grasmere School, where William, Mary, and Dorothy Wordsworth all taught. And so he rejected it, even while preserving the passages in The Excursion that sing its praises.