A normal school was a school created to train high school graduates to be teachers. Its purpose was to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name. Most such schools are now called teachers' colleges; however, in some places, the term normal school is still used.
In 1685, Saint John Baptist de La Salle, founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normal school, the Éc...
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A normal school was a school created to train high school graduates to be teachers. Its purpose was to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name. Most such schools are now called teachers' colleges; however, in some places, the term normal school is still used.
In 1685, Saint John Baptist de La Salle, founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normal school, the École Normale, in Reims. 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. The first public normal school in the United States was founded in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1839. It operates today as Framingham State College.
In the United States, the function of normal schools has been taken up by undergraduate and graduate schools of education; the schools themselves were...
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