Normal school

A normal school is an educational institution for training teachers. Its purpose is to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name. The term normal school is now archaic in all but a few countries. In New Zealand, for example, normal schools are affiliated with Teachers colleges. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, normal schools in the United States and Canada trained primary school teachers, while in Europe, normal schools educated primary, secondary and tertiary-level teachers.

In the United States, the function of normal school has been taken up by undergraduate and graduate schools of education. Many famous universities, such as the University of California, Los Angeles were founded as normal schools. In Canada, such institutions are typically part of a university as the Faculty of Education offering a one- or two-year Bachelor of Education program. It requires at least three (usually four) years of prior undergraduate studies.

Usage

The term normal school originated in the early 19th century from the French école normale, because the first such schools were established as standard models to be emulated by other schools.

The terminology is preserved in the official translations of such schools in both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China since the early 20th century. A Chinese normal university (Chinese: 師範大學; Hanyu Pinyin: shīfàn dàxué, abbreviated 師大; shīdà) is usually controlled by the national or provincial government. A teachers' college (師範學院; shīfàn xuéyuàn, abbreviated 師院; shīyuàn) has lower entrance requirements.

History

The first normal schools in the United States were founded in Massachusetts beginning in the late 1830s, thanks largely to the efforts of education reformers such as Horace Mann. Normal School, the first of its kind in the United States, opened in 1839 in Lexington, Massachusetts; it has since moved and is now known as Framingham State College. Influenced by similar academies in Prussia and elsewhere in Europe, they were intended to improve the quality of the burgeoning common school system by producing more qualified teachers.

The first normal school to open west of the Appalachian Mountains in the United States was the institution now known as Illinois State University, which opened in 1857. The first to open west of the Mississippi River was Winona State Normal School, now called Winona State University, opening in 1858. Its creation was one of the first acts of the newly-formed Minnesota Legislature.

Early normal schools in Latin America include several in Mexico, such as the Escuela Normal de Enseñanza Mutua de Oaxaca (1824), the Escuela Normal Mixta de San Luis Potosí (1849), the Normal de Guadalajara (1881), and the Escuela Normal para Profesores de Instrucción Primaria (1887). The Mexican normal school system was nationalized and reorganized by the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Department of Public Education) under José Vasconcelos in 1921.

Perhaps the oldest continually operating normal school in Latin America is the Escuela Normal Superior José Abelardo Núñez, founded in Santiago, Chile, in 1842 as the Escuela de Preceptores de Santiago under the direction of the emininent Argentine educator, writer, and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. The first normal school in the Dominican Republic was founded in 1875 by Puerto Rican educator and activist Eugenio María de Hostos.