The Scope of the Normal School

IT would seem strange to hear any reasonably well-informed man of our time assert that teachers cannot be aided in their work by special training; and yet it has not been so long since the most intelligent and observing men have come to hold this opinion. Not so many years ago, an English schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster, first promulgated the then unheard-of doctrine that teaching, like the practice of medicine or law, was an art that could be acquired and perfected by familiarizing one’s self with the peculiar conditions and characteristics which distinguish it from other arts. In our own country, the stormy times during the first years of the normal school illustrate the notion, then prevalent, that skillfulness in teaching depends upon a sort of instinct which will show itself at the appropriate time, without any special attention being paid to it. It seems that our early forefathers held stoutly to this, for the first note in favor of special training for teachers in the colonies was sounded in the Massachusetts Magazine for June, 1789, by one supposed to be Elisha Ticknor ; but it was not until a number of years afterward, about 1824, that a school was established whose avowed purpose it was to train teachers. This school was opened at Concord, Vt., by Samuel R. Hall, who, a little later, published the Lectures on Teaching, which constituted the only book literature on this subject for a number of years, and which was very widely circulated among the teachers of the country. Another school for the training of teachers was opened at Lancaster, Mass., in 1827, by James G. Carter, sometimes called the “ father of the normal school; ” but it was not until Horace Mann took charge of school matters in Massachusetts that the normal school idea took substantial root in the school system of our country. By his efforts three normal schools were opened in Massachusetts, about 1840 : one at Lexington, one at Barré, and one at Westfield, with “ Father Pierce,” Samuel J. May, and C. B. Tillinghast, respectively, as principals ; and although a very vigorous attack was made on these schools by the legislature of Massachusetts in 1840, still they are all in existence at the present time ; the location of the schools at Lexington and Barré, however, having been changed several times, until they are now permanently situated at Framingham and Bridgewater.

The report of the committee appointed by the legislature of Massachusetts to investigate the work of these new institutions is very interesting, as showing what the law-makers of that period thought about the art of teaching and the way it is acquired. “Academies and high schools,” they said. “ cost the Commonwealth nothing; and they are fully competent, in the opinion of the committee, to furnish a competent supply of teachers. . . . It appears to your committee that every person who has himself undergone the process of instruction must acquire by that very process the art of instructing others.” But these were not the opinions of the most eminent men of that period, for at the opening of the first normal school at Lexington President John Quincy Adams said : “ We see monarchs expending vast sums establishing normal schools throughout their realms, and sparing no pains to convey knowledge and efficiency to all the children of their poorest subjects. . . . Shall monarchies steal a march on republics in the patronage of that education on which a republic is based ? ” And Daniel Webster said on the same occasion : “ This plan of a normal school for Plymouth County is designed to elevate our common schools, and thus carry out the noble idea of our Pilgrim Fathers. . . . Now, if normal schools are to teach teachers, they enlist this interest on the right side ; they make parents and all who [in] any way influence childhood competent for their high office.”

The normal school idea had become too firmly implanted in the minds of those familiar with educational needs to be uprooted by the hostile report of a committee, and so the founding of normal schools, public and private, pushed forward, although with some opposition, in all parts of our country. It was not, however, until the normal school at Oswego, N. Y., had been in operation for several years that the American public agreed that this sort of school had a rightful and useful place in our system of education, —if indeed it can truly be said that our people have even yet become thoroughly convinced of this. True it is, at any rate, that people interested practically in educational work flocked to Oswego from all parts of the country to witness the wonders to be seen there ; and they generally went home to establish normal schools in the States and cities from which they came, until at the present time there are upwards of one hundred and thirty-five public normal schools, and many others under private control ; and in many States, as Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Kentucky, where normal schools have long been in existence, there is a constant demand being made for the establishment of others. Nor is this all, for chairs and departments of pedagogy have been founded in many colleges and universities, and several normal and teachers’ colleges have been opened in different parts of the land.

In the foundation of teachers’ seminaries and normal schools, both in this country and abroad, one main purpose has been kept in view ; and that is the training of teachers for the common schools, such as are usually supported in whole or in part at public expense. It is a very natural inference that if the State supports a certain grade of schools, and compels attendance upon them, it should go further, and provide competent teachers for them ; and this is what the public normal school system of this and other countries is expected to do. It is a well-known fact, however, that a large percentage of the common schools of our country do not get their teachers in any considerable numbers from the normal schools ; yet it is these schools that the State is chiefly interested in, and that it maintains, free of expense, for the benefit of all its citizens. But at present the State not only supports elementary instruction in the common schools ; it also aids secondary education by its substantial encouragement in a financial way of the public high school system ; and it naturally follows that if the State gives aid to secondary education, it should be anxious, or at least it should not object, to have its contributions made good use of in the high school by the employment of good teachers, such as the normal school is expected to produce. This leaves the normal school free to fit teachers for the secondary as well as the elementary schools; or rather, it gives normal school graduates liberty, and even encouragement, to seek secondary as well as elementary school work. In many States, too, a certain kind of elementary school work, principally found in the common ungraded schools, but also in many cases in the primary and grammar grades, is so very poorly remunerated that a normal graduate cannot afford to undertake it, and teachers are drawn from high schools, or even from the elementary schools themselves. Hitherto, also, the high schools have not been offering such inducements as to attract college-bred men and women to fill all their positions, and this has left many places for normal school graduates, who have naturally sought after them rather than after the less desirable places in the elementary schools.

It must be acknowledged that the mission of the normal school in our country is still a matter of uncertainty in regard to some of the particulars of its work, although it is perhaps definitely settled that it has a great, useful, and legitimate field in preparing those who are to have the direction of our public school work to undertake this vast responsibility in an intelligent and competent manner. But who are to partake of its privileges, anti for what grade and class of work it is to prepare instructors, are still questions upon which schoolmen and the people at large disagree ; nor are these difficulties confined to our own land, although they are not so formidable in those countries where the different parts of the school system are closely articulated, and the work of each part is definitely known. W. T. Harris, in his report of 1888-89, says of the normal schools of Austria : “ It is the intention of the law that these schools should prepare teachers by means of purely professional training, but the minister states that many of them are still burdened with academic studies, from want of preparation on the part of candidates for admission ; ” and a similar statement might be made concerning the work of the normal schools in most other European countries. This is, perhaps, the most serious problem that is before the normal school in our country to-day ; for, on the one hand, the people in many localities where it has been newly established cry out against it as a needless extravagance, attempting work which can as well be accomplished by the high schools already in existence ; and, on the other hand, it is found to be impossible to get students who have sufficient academic preparation to qualify them to undertake intelligently strictly professional work. This apparent overlapping of the provinces of the high and normal school has engendered a great deal of strife between them in the past, and in some localities this antagonism is still very annoying. Theoretically, the normal school is a strictly professional institution; it is established to lead its students to become acquainted with the nature of the child to be educated, and to understand how the subjects of instruction in the schools must be adapted to develop that, nature in the best, broadest, and most speedy manner possible. It presupposes on the part of those who seek its instruction a knowledge of the different subjects upon which the child’s mind is to be exercised in the school; but this knowledge has reference only to the facts of any subject arranged in a logical order, which constitutes it a science, and not to these facts in their relation to the growing, developing mind. In other words, the normal school expects its prospective students to have an academic or scientific knowledge of the branches of instruction, and its business will be to give them a teaching knowledge of the same subjects, — to lead them to reflect upon, and become masters of, the best methods of stimulating the child’s mind in order to achieve any desired result. It further expects to lead its students to become intelligently critical of all the conditions in their future schoolrooms which will affect the activity of their pupils’ minds either favorably or unfavorably, and it will enable them to become skillful in so ordering the environment as to make all work toward the more ready and complete attainment of the wished-for end. This work is spoken of, generally, under the heads, psychology, pedagogy, methods of teaching the various branches, school economy, history of education, ethics, and apprenticeship, or practice teaching under criticism. Strictly speaking, this is all the normal school should attempt to do, and it is all it would do in a well defined, closely articulated school system. With high school or college graduates it would take perhaps two years to complete this work in proper fashion, although very much good could be gotten from it in one year. But, as is well known, there are few normal schools in our country that do only this professional work, most of them offering two or three years of distinctly academic or high school work, which the majority of students are obliged to take because of insufficient previous preparation. It is not usually the choice of the normal school that it does this high school work ; on the contrary, it has generally striven to get along without it, but it has rarely been successful.

That there is often a just complaint against a waste of educational energy, while the normal school is doing what can and ought properly to be done by the high school, must certainly be acknowledged ; but the blame must not be heaped upon the normal school alone, for it is but striving to adapt itself to the various needs of the school system of which it is a part. There is, in some instances at least, a justification for its offering academic courses; for it is often located in communities where the high schools cannot give the preparation needed, or are not numerous enough to accommodate all who would be obliged to attend them if graduation were necessary before entering the normal. This is especially true in many of the Western States, but it can scarcely apply to many of the older Eastern States, where the normal schools offer about the same amount of academic work. In a community where there are abundant opportunities for academic preparation, as in Massachusetts or New York, it seems to many people to be wasteful of educational energy for the normal school to spend the better part of its strength in duplicating these opportunities ; and yet, upon closer examination, it will not appear so wasteful, for it is known to all schoolmen that the academic work in the normal schools in these States is of a much higher character, from a pedagogical standpoint, than that done in the high schools, and illustrates to prospective teachers in a much sounder and better manner how the various subjects must be taught in their own schools ; and the environment of the normal school is much more healthful and stimulative to the candidate for pedagogical insight and ability than is that of the academy or high school. In the one case the novice is surrounded constantly by conditions that indicate to him what will be essential for the most complete success in his future work ; good illustrations and suggestions of the art of teaching are ever before him, and these cannot but have an influence, unrecognized though it may be, in preparing him the better for his work ; and this, too, when he is busily engaged in his academic studies. In the other case he has no such surrounding influences ; his associations in no wise suggest to him the character of the work he will be called upon to do in his own schools, and are no help whatever to him in preparing for it: there is no practice school, no experimental work in teaching all about him, — in short, no teaching atmosphere that the high school student continually inhales, as does his more favored normal competitor. This teaching environment has certainly a most beneficial influence upon the thousands of youth, all over our country, who remain in the normal schools for a year or two, doing only academic work, and then go into the ordinary district schools to labor. They have seen somewhat of things pedagogical, and will have some star, of lesser magnitude though it may be, that will keep them looking forward and upward.

There are other reasons why the normal school has found it expedient to do academic work, and chief among them is this : that a great many who are now helped by the normal would never receive its benefits if they had to wait until they could first pursue a course in the high school. It is well known that it is in the main those who have become dependent upon their own efforts for a livelihood who look forward to securing such positions as the normal school can prepare them for; and, consequently, it is this needy class of students that the normal school receives. And again, the positions which these normal - trained teachers will fill do not offer such financial returns as will encourage them to make elaborate and scholarly preparation for their work. If they take places in the elementary schools, — and it is with tacit understanding that they will do this that the State has given them their education, — they will receive little more, and in some States no more, than the ordinary unskilled laborer working on the farm or in the woods. The average wages paid to elementary teachers in sixty-nine of the principal cities given in Commissioner Harris’s last report does not exceed sixty dollars per month, and in many cities it falls considerably below this, for positions such as the ordinary normal school graduate can fill ; while the average wages paid to district school teachers in most of the Eastern States does not exceed twenty-five dollars per month, and in some of the Western and Southern States it is appreciably less. Most of the cities that pay good wages have private normal schools now to prepare their own teachers, so that this leaves only the poorly paid positions in elementary and some secondary schools for the graduates of the state normal school.

If, then, the normal school is to prepare teachers for the common schools, it cannot exact a very high standard of preparatory training from them, and at the same time give them such professional instruction as it now attempts to. It feels that it cannot ask them to spend four years in the high school before they can enjoy its privileges ; but instead it must give high and normal school training combined, in two, three, or four years, as the case may require. If the normal school should refuse to accommodate itself in this way to the common schools, the result would be, as has been shown in two or three notable instances, that, on the one hand, it would get few students, — those only who are looking toward the higher positions in secondary schools ; and on the other hand, the common schools would employ only those who have had very little, if any professional training, and the purpose of the normal school would thus be frustrated. It is not true as yet, at least in most parts of our country, that the normal school can set the standard for the common school by raising its own requirements for admission and graduation. The normal is at present being conditioned by the common school, instead of setting it a standard. And this seems eminently proper, in a certain sense; for while in matters pedagogical the normal school should be authority, yet in matters financial and in the general subject of common school education the voice of the people should be heard.

Is the normal school, then, doing just what is best under the circumstances ? And, in the general evolution of our school system, will it always take and hold its rightful place ? From its history it would seem that it has had to get its present place by more or less of violence, and it is not to be believed that its future is to be free from struggles in attaining the ideals that have long been before it. In order that the normal school shall attempt only professional work, or more advanced work of any kind than it is attempting now, it must first have some assurance that its teachers will find such places in the schools as will warrant them in spending the required amount of time and money in preparation. Legislation must ordain that no teacher shall be employed in any school, toward the maintenance of which public funds are appropriated, unless he shall have a certain amount of professional training ; this amount to be determined by the character of the school he is to teach, and the ability of the people in the community to compensate him for his work. This would have a most salutary effect upon the common schools themselves, making them far more efficient than they now are, and enabling them to accomplish more fully the purposes for which they are established and supported at public expense. In his report of 1891—92, as secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts, John W. Dickinson says: ‘’It is a great misfortune to the schools that about fifteen hundred new recruits annually enter the corps of public school teachers. The time has long passed when it should be possible for a person to enter the ranks without special training, successful practice under searching criticism, and certification for the work by proper authorities. When such requirements are made imperative, the supply will no longer exceed the demand ; then wages for teaching will rise to the level of those paid for clerical work and other professional service.” When this is done, the work of the normal school will be more clearly defined. It can demand of its students such an amount of preparatory training as will enable them intelligently to undertake its professional work, and it can organize its instruction so as to prepare teachers for the common schools, feeling sure that they will be needed.

Looking at the work of the normal school in some of the European countries, we find a somewhat different, and in many respects more favorable condition of affairs. In Prussia, at the close of the year 1889, there were one hundred and sixteen normal schools under the direction of the government, all of which were preparing teachers solely for the people’s, or elementary schools. No teacher can find a permanent position in these people’s schools unless he possesses a diploma from one of the normals; and the effect of this is to draw into the schools only those who have had professional instruction. It must be granted that the work of the normal school, wherever found, and its relative position in a school system, must be determined by the character of the rest of the system, since it is not properly an institution of learning in itself, but a training school, designed to give healthy and wholesome direction to the schools that are concerned with learning in literature and in the arts and sciences. Now, in Prussia, teaching is a life business, and the teacher is a state officer, who receives a pension when he becomes incapacitated by age for profitable labor. The Prussian government is able to determine approximately how many teachers will be needed for the schools each year, and it can so order the normal school work as just to supply these needs. In our own country, of course, there is no such certainty ; for no one has any idea how many new teachers will be needed at any given period, since very many of those employed at any time are only working under a sort of compulsion, looking forward to some fortuitous circumstance, such as marriage or a favorable business opportunity, to release them from their captivity. Our elementary schools, too, it seems, are not regarded so highly by the people at large as are the people’s schools in Prussia, and consequently the social position of our elementary teachers is not so favorable in comparison ; and this does not encourage teachers of talent to go into our common schools, but leaves the places instead to persons with scanty preparation and culture as well as a lack of native strength and ability. In France, there are now about one hundred and seventy normal schools, or ” training colleges,” that prepare teachers for the elementary schools only; whileseveral higher training colleges, such as the well-known École Normale Supérieure at Paris, in the Sorbonne, and chairs of pedagogy at Lyons, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, afford the teachers in the higher schools whatever professional training they get. In Prussia, the departments of pedagogy in the universities afford opportunities to prepare for the higher positions. In Scotland, the seven training colleges and the chairs of pedagogy at St. Andrews and Edinburgh prepare teachers for all grades of the schools ; and here, as in Prussia, the state gives such protection and encouragement to its teachers as to lead all who enter the profession to remain there. In England, the efforts of the forty-four training colleges are spent mainly in supplying the elementary schools with teachers, although work of a higher grade has been encouraged ; and now Oxford and Cambridge are making provisions to prepare teachers for the higher positions. The normal school work in Austria and Hungary is much like that in Prussia, being made very definite because of the definiteness of the different phases of the school system as a whole.

In comparison with these countries, it can be seen that the normal school with us has as yet a rather uncertain field of work, so far as the preparation of teachers for any particular grade of school instruction is concerned. The place which its originators in this country expected it would fill is being filled now, in some States, by teachers’ classes for a term or so in the academies and high schools; in other States, by summer schools and teachers’ institutes; while in a few the field is still vacant. The normal school in our country has ever been ambitious to do work of a higher character than would fit its students to labor contentedly in the humble institutions that correspond approximately to the people’s schools in other lands; and that this is a worthy ambition need not be denied here. But as our educational facilities have increased, and our school work as a whole has aimed toward higher standards, there has been a growing sentiment that the higher positions in teaching should demand a broad general as well as professional education, and it has never been seriously maintained that the normal school could or ought to give the first of these. So the colleges and universities have risen to the occasion, and have added chairs and departments to their regular curricula, designed to afford opportunities for some professional instruction for such college students as intend to become teachers. A few universities, such as De Pauw, Hillsdale, the University at Nashville, Tenn., and others, have established veritable normal schools, which do work much like that of the ordinary public normal school, except perhaps that they are enabled, because of their environment, to maintain more scholarly standards. In addition there have been founded independent normal colleges, such as the New York College for the Training of Teachers and the college at Albany, N. Y., which do strictly professional work of a high character ; aiming to fit their students for positions in training schools, for principalships, superintendencies, etc. They are, properly speaking, post-graduate professional schools. There has been a strong desire felt of late, also, by many of the better class of the state normal schools, to found post-graduate departments, where work like that of the independent normal colleges can be done, admitting to this course only college graduates; and such courses are now being offered by some of the normal schools in Massachusetts, and by several in other parts of the country. This very naturally suggests the question, Shall then all positions in the secondary schools be closed to the ordinary trained teachers ? As at present arranged, a considerable number of teachers in secondary institutions have had only normal school training, and the normal schools have been very ambitious to prepare at least some of their teachers for such places. But, as has been said, the opportunities for a college and university education have multiplied so rapidly that there has been developed a strong sentiment in favor of college-trained persons taking the secondary positions ; and this is being carried into effect as rapidly as the schools can afford the increased expense. It may be questioned, however, if the colleges can as yet prepare teachers for the secondary schools as well as the normal school. They can and do give broad scholarship and technical knowledge ; but these are ineffective instruments in the hands of the average college man or woman, with no professional training or experience. As between good professional training with ordinary scholarship, and good scholarship with no teaching knowledge, circumstances and personality will usually decide which is the more serviceable, although it may with reason be held that the art of teaching can be readily acquired by one who has had good scholarly discipline ; but it must be remembered that the collegetrained person generally sticks to teaching only long enough to acquire this art, and during his years of apprenticeship the normal school graduate will be even in the race, and in many cases ahead. If the college man had had good examples of teaching set him at his Alma Mater, he would not be so utterly at sea at first; but it is a well-known fact that college instructors and professors are not in any considerable numbers teachers, and they look down with a feeling akin to contempt upon all efforts to acquire the art. When pedagogical courses were first offered in several of the universities of the country, the professors in other departments generally advised their students to keep out of them, and this attitude is still held to some extent; and while perhaps there was not much to be gained from the usual university course in pedagogy, yet there was, and is, hostility to it on general principles.

There is, no doubt, some justification for this attitude on the part of college men toward the art of teaching, for in all their work with students they emphasize the spirit of independence and research ; while those who have been engaged in the training of teachers have been, in the main, impressing upon them their own individuality and methods of teaching, and have laid little store by independent investigation on the part of their students. We have heard in past years, and do hear still, a great deal about “ cut-and-dried methods of teaching ; ” and as the normal school has been the chief dispenser of these, it has gained an unenviable reputation in college circles, and as a consequence the whole system that has to do with the making of teachers has come to be looked upon with suspicion. It is true that a majority of those who have been at the normal schools have been getting mainly cut-and-dried methods and devices of teaching, and the philosophical and psychological principles underlying these have been neglected. The practice departments of many of the normal schools have been places where the prospective teacher could get such devices and methods as those at the head of the departments had found useful, but where it would be possible for him to make but little original investigation. We need not search far to find the reasons for this state of affairs. In the first place, the students who have sought these schools have not had the culture and training that would enable them to investigate and understand abstract principles of education, and apply them in original research and discovery in the practice schools. Most of them have had to be imitators, for they have not had the intellectual discipline that would make them intelligently independent; and the normal schools have held that they might better be followers of those who have had conspicuous success in teaching than go on in their own crude way for the sake of the mere sentiment, in their cases, of independence. Again, students have gone to the normal schools for a definite, practical purpose; they have been anxious to get something which they could use in their schoolrooms at once, rather than wait several years to work out into serviceable application the philosophical and psychological principles which they might get in their preparatory study. For the ordinary untrained mind, one that has not become skillful in tracing the delicate thread of cause and effect in mental activity, there is a great gap between psychological theory and the actual organization of work in the classroom so as to attain in the most speedy and safe manner possible the desired end of educational processes. The normal schools have, perhaps, emphasized too much the side of organization, and have thus not allowed enough freedom for the development of personality in the teachers they have trained ; but this condition is gradually changing according as students are having better opportunities for broader mental discipline before they enter the school. The practice schools are becoming the educational experimental stations of our country, and are, with a few exceptions, making whatever advances are being made in educational practice. They are no longer closely bound to past or even to existing methods of teaching, but are investigating along all lines looking toward improvement ; and already much has been done in proving the value of new subjects of study, and introducing them into the common school course; and also in a more definite study of child nature, and the adaptation of school instruction to that nature. But of course the normal school is a practical institution, and must do practical work ; it must have certain methods of school organization and teaching in which it believes, and it must ever impress these upon its students, so that they will have something in hand when they go into their own schools. It is supposed to be, and most often is, the abiding-place of all the best that has been worked out in the past toward an art of teaching; and there is certainly no one who has ever tried his hand at the art who will not acknowledge that there is a considerable body of information concerning it that may profitably be acquired from those who have had successful experience, just as is the case in any of the arts which men practice. A teacher will not deal most wisely with a child’s mind in the school, any more than a physician will deal most wisely with its body, without study and apprenticeship. It has been the failure of the universities to recognize the importance of this study and apprenticeship in the art of teaching that has made them so slow in giving it a place in their curricula; and the consequence is that college-trained persons who teach have, in most cases, to work out de novo their art, — very poorly, too, sometimes, and at a great disadvantage to themselves and to the pupils under their direction.

But there are some signs that this difficulty is passing away, and that the secondary schools can get competently prepared teachers who have had the advantages of training in the higher institutions. In the first place, as we have seen, higher normal schools are being established that aim especially to give instruction in the history, theory, and art of education to college graduates; and attempts are being made also to have college-graduate departments in the public normal schools ; but most of these are not yet ready for this step, for they cannot support a faculty of such scholarship and attainments as will attract college men and women. Again, a number of universities, such as Harvard and Cornell, have established summer schools designed particularly to aid teachers in service in secondary schools, and these have already proved to be of value. University extension has also done something for the better class of teachers, but it has been more along the line of general culture than of systematic training in any of the branches, either on the academic or professional side. More important than any of these, however, is the comparatively recent establishment of departments and chairs of pedagogy, and the offering of teachers’ courses in a number of colleges and universities in all parts of the country. The first step in this direction was taken by Brown University in 1851, but the University of Iowa was the first to establish a permanent department of pedagogy, graduation from which was indicated by the degree of bachelor of pedagogy. In several of the universities, as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Leland Stanford, and in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are special courses offered for teachers in service, these dealing mainly with the methods of teaching subjects in the secondary schools ; but Harvard offers several courses for primary and grammar teachers as well.

An examination of the work done in these universities shows that instruction is given mainly in the science or theory of education; for while in all of them courses are offered in the history, science, and art of teaching, yet this art consists almost wholly of the theory as to how the different subjects should be taught, there being no opportunity for testing and applying this theory, which, it must be granted, is an essential condition in order that the art of teaching may be serviceably acquired. As these departments of pedagogy are at present organized, it is impossible to do any such work in the art of teaching as is required in the normal school, for there are no practice or experimental schools where the student can test his ability to work out theory into practice. The most that is attempted in this direction is to send the student into the public schools in the vicinity and have him observe what is being done there; but even observing another’s work is hardly acquiring the art for one’s self, although it certainly may be an aid toward it. In some of the universities, of which Clark University at Worcester, Mass., is an example, very little attention is given to the art of teaching as compared with the science of education, the purpose being “to give instruction and training to those who are preparing to be professors of pedagogy, superintendents, or teachers in the higher institutions,” and “ to make scientific contributions to education.” The work in education at Leland Stanford, as Professor Earl Barnes says in a recent number of the Educational Review, “ is not intended primarily to fit students for the grammar grades and lower high school positions in California. . . . Our aim is, instead, to turn out a few thoroughly trained men and women with a scientific knowledge of children, with some experience in examining educational problems at first hand, with a good knowledge of the development of the human mind in the past, and fairly well acquainted with the best thought and practice in educational matters at present.” In Cornell, Michigan, Minnesota, and other universities, practical lecture courses are given in the art of instruction and school management in general, methods of teaching the various branches, school economy, and school hygiene ; and some observation of school systems and class work in the vicinity is required. It is worthy of note here that the colleges for women, with two or three exceptions, offer no courses whatever in either the science or the art of education, though of course all pedagogic work in coeducational institutions is open to women as well as men.

It can be seen from this brief review that our higher institutions are not yet ready adequately to train teachers for positions in the secondary schools; nor can they expect to be able to do this until they have connected with their pedagogical departments model and practice schools where candidates can see good teaching done, and can themselves attempt to teach under the care and guidance of some skilled critic. In Germany there are practice schools connected with the universities, where all students of education try to apply their theory ; and this is true in some measure in Scotland, for there are training colleges in connection with some of the universities, such as Edinburgh and St. Andrews. The need of practice schools as an aid to the work in our own universities has come to be generally acknowledged, and in a recent number of the Pedagogical Seminary President G. Stanley Hall outlines a plan for such a school at Clark University, and urges its immediate establishment. Until this step shall be quite generally taken by the universities, either the normal schools must continue to give professional instruction to those seeking positions in secondary schools, and even instructorships in colleges, or else these positions must be filled by incompetently prepared teachers. In his last report, Commissioner Harris says in this connection : “ It may be said that an intelligent graduate of a thoroughly taught high school, who had attentively read Compayré’s History of Pedagogical Ideas, a book on methods and management, and Sully’s Psychology, for example, might graduate immediately and with honor from the great majority of the normal departments or teachers’ courses of our colleges and universities.”

As a last word, then, it must be said that the true function of the normal school, while yet impossible to be fully realized because of the character of our school system as a whole, is still being gradually approached as the duties of the several parts of this system become more clearly defined and accomplished. It should be emphasized again that the normal school must adapt itself to the other parts of our school system ; it must wait for them to determine in a large measure its field of usefulness. That it has come to stay there can be little question, and it is only a matter of time when it shall attain its ideal, that of purely professional instruction in the preparation of teachers for the elementary schools.

M. V. O’Shea.