Page:A history of the Michigan state normal school (now Normal college) at Ypsilanti, Michigan, 1849-1899 (IA historyofmichiga00putniala).pdf/120



CHAPTER IV.

Development of the Training School.

First Period.

The original act establishing the Normal School required the Board of Education to provide a Model or Experimental school in connection with it. The people of Ypsilanti, in their offer of land and money to secure the location of the school in their city, proposed to defray, for a time, a large part of the expense of supporting this Model departinent. Such a school was opened at the commencement of the second term of the Normal. ‘The history of the progress and development of ‘“The Model’’, as it was called for a long while, is of peculiar interest to any one engaged in tracing the slow growth of means and appliances for the proper and profitable practical training of teachers. “‘The Model’’ has shared, to the fullest extent, in the changes and experiments made in the courses of study and instruction in the Normal school proper.

At the time of its organization the Board had space and conveniences for only a small number of pupils. A single room and a single teacher were all that could be provided. The attendance during the first term was twenty-seven, and during each of the years 1854 and 1855 the number of pupils was about seventy-five. By changes in the courses of studies and in the terms of admission to the Normal, in 1856, the number nominally belonging to the Model, was raised, according to the report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for that year, to two hundred and thirty-seven. The same authority gives the number of “‘model school pupils and academics’’ for the year 1857 as three hundred. It is hardly necessary to say that these