Normal School

a school for the training of teachers. American normal schools received their first impulse from Germany. In that country no person can become a teacher, even of a rural school, without first taking a training course. In 1839 the first training schools in the United States were established at Lexington, Barre, and Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The credit belongs to Horace Mann, then the executive officer of the state board of education. The legislature regarded these schools as an expensive and hazardous experiment. The first appropriation for their support was made for three years only. The schools proved so successful, however, that they were provided with buildings and were made a permanent part of the state system.

From Massachusetts the movement spread westward and southward. New York was the second state to establish normal schools. Michigan was the first of the newer states to establish a training school. In 1864 the first normal school on the Mississippi River was established at Winona, Minnesota. The Cook County Normal, with which Colonel Parker was connected, was established in Chicago in 1867. The Canadian provinces have a thorough system and insist on attendance.

According to the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1909, there were in the United States 257 public normal schools and sixty-four private schools. The former enrolled 74,370 students; the latter 7,918. Less than one-third of the students were males. New York and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Wisconsin, have the greatest number of public normal schools. Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada report no training schools. The number of graduates from public normal schools is over 12,000 a year.

The following statistics of public normal schools are taken from the report of the United States Commissioner of Education for the school year ending January, 1909:

Many years ago I set myself to the work of studying the methods of schools for the training of teachers, having noticed the superiority of their graduates over those without professional education, both in furnishing skilled teachers and inspiring them with a professional zeal that causes them to improve for many years after entering the work of teaching. . . .

The teacher who is to teach these elementary branches after graduation finds no work of preparation in the normal school half so valuable as this review of those branches in the light of more advanced studies. No work that is done in the secondary school--that is to say, the high school or academy--is an equivalent for the normal-school work done on the same studies. What is learned for the first time in the elementary or the secondary schools is learned as a step to what lies beyond. Thus, arithmetic is a step towards algebra, and geography a step towards the organic sciences, such as biology, geology, and ethnology. When the pupil has climbed to the studies beyond, he drops the elementary steps out of sight. Of course it follows that, in the high school or in the college, those lower branches are not reviewed in the light of the higher branches--arithmetic is not studied anew in the light of algebra and geometry; descriptive geography is not reviewed in the light of physical geography, botany, zoology, and geology; English grammar is not reviewed in the light of studies in Latin and Greek, or in philosophy and logic; nor the history of the United States seen in its relations to that of Great Britain and the continental nations of Europe.

But the teacher needs precisely this reexamination of all his elementary branches in their relations to the higher studies that furnish them their rules and laws.

It has happened that the American normal school has taken up just this work of review from the beginning, and has performed it well during the entire sixty years of its existence. . . . . The higher the standard of preparation in the pupils who enter the normal school, the more profitable is this work of reviewing the lower branches in the light of the higher, and thus studying them constructively.--U. S. Commissioner Wm. T. Harris.