THE BEGINNINGS OF NORMAL-SCHOOL TRAINING. The training of would-be teachers for the work of instruction is an entirely modern proceeding. The first class definitely organized for imparting training to teachers, concerning which we have any record, was a small local training group of teachers of reading and the Catechism, conducted by Father Démia, at Lyons, France, in 1672. The first normal school to be established anywhere was that founded at Rheims, in northern France, in 1685, by Abbé de la Salle (p. 347). He had founded the Order of "The Brothers of the Christian Schools" the preceding year, to provide free religious instruction for children of the working classes in France (R. 182), and he conceived the new idea of creating a special school to train his prospective teachers for the teaching work of his Order. Shortly afterward he established two similar institutions in Paris. Each institution he called a "Seminary for Schoolmasters." In addition to imparting a general education of the type of the time, and a thorough grounding in religion, his student teachers were trained to teach in practice schools, under the direction of experienced teachers. This was an entirely new idea.
The beginnings elsewhere, as we have previously pointed out were made in German lands, Francke's Seminarium Praeceptorum, established at Halle (p. 419), in 1697, coming next in point of time. In 1738 Johann Julius Hecker (1707-68), one of Francke's teachers (p. 562), established the first regular Seminary for Teachers in Prussia, and in 1748 he established a private Lehrerseminar in Berlin. In these two institutions he first showed the German people the possibilities of special training for teachers in the secondary school. In 1753 the Berlin institution was adopted as a Royal Teachers' Seminary (p. 563) by Frederick the Great. After this, and in part due to the enthusiastic support of the Berlin institution by the King, the teacher-training idea for secondary teachers began to find favor among the Germans. We accordingly find something like a dozen Teachers' Seminaries had been founded in German lands before the close of the eighteenth century. [1] A normal school was established in Denmark, by royal decree, as early as 1789, and five additional schools when the law organizing public instruction in Denmark was enacted, in 1814. In France the beginnings of state action came with the action of the National Convention, which decreed the establishment of the "Superior Normal School for France," in 1794 (p. 517). This institution, though, was short lived, and the real beginnings of the French higher normal school awaited the reorganizing work of Napoleon, in 1808 (p. 595; R. 283).
The schools just mentioned represent the first institutions in the history of the world organized for the purpose of training teachers to teach. The teachers they trained, though, were intended primarily for the secondary schools, and the training was largely academic in character. Only in Silesia was any effort made, before the nineteenth century, to give training in special institutions to teachers intended for the vernacular schools. There Frederick the Great, in his "Regulations for the Catholic Schools of Silesia" (R. 275, a § 2) designated six cathedral and monastery schools as model schools, where teachers could "have the opportunity for learning all that is needed by a good teacher." In another place he defined this as "skill in singing and playing the organ sufficient to perform the services of the Church," and "the art of instructing the young in the German language" (R. 275, a § 1). So long as the instruction in the vernacular school consisted chiefly of reading and the Catechism, and of hearing pupils recite what they had memorized, there was of course but little need for any special training for the teachers. It was not until after Pestalozzi had done his work and made his contribution that there was anything worth mentioning to train teachers for.
PESTALOZZI'S CONTRIBUTION. The memorable work done by Pestalozzi in Switzerland, during his quarter-century (1800-25) of effort at Burgdorf and Yverdon, changed the whole face of the preparation of teachers problem. His work was so fundamental that it completely redirected the education of children. Taking the seed-thought of Rousseau that sense- impression was "the only true foundation of human knowledge" (R. 267), he enlarged this to the conception of the mental development of human beings as being organic, and proceeding according to law. His extension of this idea of Rousseau's led him to declare that education was an individual development, a drawing-out and not a pouring-in; that the basis of all education exists in the nature of man; and that the method of education is to be sought and constructed. [2] These were his great contributions. These ideas fitted in well with the rising tide of individualism which marked the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, and upon these contributions the modern secular elementary school has been built.
These ideas led Pestalozzi to emphasize sense perception and expression; to formulate the rule that in teaching we must proceed from the concrete to the abstract; and to construct a "faculty psychology" which conceived of education as "a harmonious development" of the different "faculties" of the mind. He also tried, unsuccessfully to be sure, to so organize the teaching process that eventually it could be so "mechanized" that there would be a regular A, B, C, for each type of instruction, which, once learned, would give perfection to a teacher. In his Report of 1800 (R. 267), which forms a very clear statement of his aims, he had said:
I know what I am undertaking; but neither the difficulties in the way, nor my own limitations in skill and insight, shall hinder me from giving my mite for a purpose which Europe needs so much… The most essential point from which I start is this:—Sense-impression of Nature is the only true foundation of human knowledge. All that follows is the result of this sense-impression, and the process of abstraction from it….
Then the problem I have to solve is this:—How to bring the elements of every art into harmony with the very nature of mind, by following the psychological mechanical laws by which mind rises from physical sense-impressions to clear ideas.
Largely out of these ideas and the new direction he gave to instruction the modern normal school for training teachers for the elementary schools arose.
ORAL AND OBJECTIVE TEACHING DEVELOPED. Up to the time of Pestalozzi, and for years after he had done his work, in many lands and places the instruction of children continued to be of the memorization of textbook matter and of the recitation type. The children learned what was down in the book, and recited the answers to the teacher. Many of the early textbooks were constructed on the plan of the older Catechism—that is, on a question and answer plan (R. 351 a). There was nothing for children to do but to memorize such textbook material, or for the teacher but to see that the pupils knew the answers to the questions. It was school-keeping, not teaching, that teachers were engaged in.
The form of instruction worked out by Pestalozzi, based on sense- perception, reasoning, and individual judgment, called for a complete change in classroom procedure. What Pestalozzi tried most of all to do was to get children to use their senses and their minds, to look carefully, to count, to observe forms, to get, by means of their five important senses, clear impressions and ideas as to objects and life in the world about them, and then to think over what they had seen and be able to answer his questions, because they had observed carefully and reasoned clearly. Pestalozzi thus clearly subordinated the printed book to the use of the child's senses, and the repetition of mere words to clear ideas about things. Pestalozzi thus became one of the first real teachers.