From Normal School to Teachers College

THE NORMAL school has become the teachers college. W h i l e a few institutions are still named normal schools, these will soon be gone. T h i s transformation, which is much more than a change in name, has been amazingly rapid. During the first sixty years of their existence, the normal schools were poorly supported, isolated institutions. T h e y have had, however, a significant central purpose which made them sturdy and fitted them into the American scene. T h e founders of this nation recognized that education for all the people was essential in a democracy. A citizen who could cooperate with his fellows in making a democracy work was essential. It was also implicit in their thought that the individual, and by that is meant all persons, should have an opportunity to become as much of a person as he could be in this new democracy. W h e n common schools were first established, it soon became apparent that the quality of the experience which children might have in them was dependent upon the quality of the teacher. It took about fifty years for the intellectuals to discover this and convince the people that a new kind of institution was necessary for the education of teachers. T h e first publiclysupported normal school was opened in 1 8 3 9 . B y the end of the century these institutions had spread all over the country. T h e y did not conform to any established academic patterns. T h e y were folk schools. W i t h the great social changes characteristic of the last fifty years, the high school became an extension of the common school. T h e teachers college, close to the people, a part of the public school system, became increasingly the institution for the preparation of teachers in the high school as well as the elementary school. T o say that there had been no association among the leaders of the rlormal schools in the nineteenth century would not be true. Charles A . Harper has written in A Century of Public Teacher Education the history of these years. It is nevertheless true that organized association began about 1 9 0 0 in the middle west. T h e American Association of Teachers Colleges was founded in 1 9 1 7 by the presidents of five institutions in the middle west. T h i s was a signal that the expansion and improvement of the teachers college as an essential part of the public school system, reaching from the first grade through the university, had begun. These far-seeing leaders recognized the need for an organization which would provide for the exchange of ideas and the improvement of their service. In the 2 3 years that have followed, the association has grown to a membership of nearly 200, distributed throughout the United States.