Page:LA2-NSRW-3-0384.jpg





by James G. Carter in 1820 and continued by Charles Brooks and especially by Horace Mann. To-day every state but contains one or more normal schools. In 1905 there were in the United States 179 public and 89 private normal schools. The majority of these admit students who have graduated from the elementary schools, giving them a four years’ course in preparation for elementary teaching. A great many, however, admit only those who have completed a high school course or its equivalent, and offer to these a course of two years. In general it may be said that the drift is toward the latter type of school. The normal school is thus enabled largely to withdraw its attention from purely academic subjects and to devote it to professional ones. It is necessary, of course, to review the subjects in the elementary curriculum. But this review can be obtained in connection with the study of methods of teaching them or from actual practice in teaching them, in practice schools. The tendency toward making the normal school a purely professional school has been going on ever since its establishment. At first it was for the sake of securing better informed rather than better trained teachers, and this may be said of the normal schools in Europe as well as of those in the United States. Eventually, as the general system of schools is rendered more efficient, it becomes possible to hand over to this the responsibility for such general information as the teacher needs, reserving for the normal school such study as is specially aimed toward fitting for teaching. It is to be noted that practice teaching under a critic teacher is probably the most valuable part of such work, and most normal schools in the United States as well as in Europe control elementary schools in which this teaching is done. In this respect the normal schools possess an advantage over the departments of education that have come to exist quite generally in the American colleges and universities, very few of which have any facilities for practice teaching. It is true that college graduates who teach go especially into secondary and higher schools, needing in consequence much more knowledge of subject matter than is required of elementary teachers. But although familiarity with his subject is the prime essential for any teacher, knowledge of how to teach is scarcely less important, and this holds of the teacher in high schools and colleges as well as of those in the primary schools. The failure to realize this is doubtless the cause of the increase of bad teaching as we go from the primary school to the university. The lack of opportunities for professional training for secondary and college teachers has caused some normal schools intended originally for the training of elementary teachers to undertake the preparation of secondary ones as well. It is probable that such work can not be done in teachers’ colleges connected with universities or in universities the departments of education of which possess practice schools. The committee on normal schools of the National Educational Association recommends the following program for a four years’ course: arithmetic, elementary algebra, plane geometry, English grammar, English, elements of rhetoric, zoology, botany, physiography, physics, chemistry, nature-study, penmanship, drawing, manual training (either domestic science or sloyd or both), reading, music, fine arts, sociology, history, civics, economics, folk-lore, general physical education, gymnastics, games, school sanitation, psychology, pedagogy, observation and teaching in the training-school. The last four should be taken for a year each, and together they should amount to one fourth of the entire course. Many of the other subjects would disappear in case the school admits only high-school graduates. Compare Modern Education, Elementary Schools and Secondary Schools.

Nor′man, Henry, an English journalist, was born at, , Sept. 19, 1858. He studied, however, in this country, graduating from Harvard College in 1881 and passing the next two years at,. He then accepted a position on the Pall Mall Gazette, London, and later became associate-editor of the Daily Chronicle. He has published works upon ,, ,  and The Balkans.  He has in recent years published The Real Japan, The Peoples and Politics of the Far East, The Near East, All the Russias and Motors and Men.

... (moved) ...