Normal school

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A normal school or normal college trains teachers in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum. Other names are teacher training colleges or teachers' colleges. In Argentina and Mexico, they continue to be called normal schools with student-teachers in the latter country being known as normalistas.^[1] Schools require a high school diploma for entry, and may be part of a comprehensive university. Normal schools in the United States, Canada, and Argentina trained teachers for primary schools, while in Europe equivalent colleges trained teachers for primary schools and later secondary schools.

In 1685, St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle established the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normal school, the École normale, in Reims, Champagne, France. The term "normal" in this context refers to the goal of these institutions to instill and reinforce particular norms within students. "Norms" included historical behavioral norms of the time, as well as norms that reinforced targeted societal values, ideologies and dominant narratives in the form of curriculum.

The first public normal school in the United States was founded in Concord, Vermont, by Samuel Read Hall in 1823 to train teachers. In 1839, the first state-supported normal school was established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the northeast corner of the historic Lexington Battle Green; it evolved into Framingham State University. The first modern teacher training school in China was established by educator Sheng Xuanhuai in 1895 as the normal school of the Nanyang Public School (now Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in Shanghai during the Qing dynasty.^[2]

Several comprehensive public or state-supported universities—such as UCLA^[3] in the United States and Beijing Normal University in China—began as normal schools and later expanded their faculties and programs to become research universities. Some of these universities, particularly in Asia, retain the word "Normal" in their name, highlighting their historical purpose. In Canada, most normal schools were eventually assimilated into a university as its faculty of education, offering a one or two-year Bachelor of Education degree. Such a degree requires at least three, but usually four, years of prior undergraduate study.