Before 2005 when I worked a night desk job at Wilson Hall…
And long before it was renovated and converted from an old women’s dorm…
Decades before my mom learned to skateboard just a few feet from there on a wide sidewalk they then called Broadway, beside the largest maple tree on campus…
Before James Michener saw the library that would bear his name, and before he taught here, and before he was a student here…Long before they moved my grandpa’s office out of Cranford Hall and the wrecking balls and front-end loaders scraped it from the landscape…
Back when Cranford Hall was the only building on campus – an impressive three-story Victorian thing that towered over the prairie…
Before it was called the University of Northern Colorado, and before the other names it carried over the years, this place was first called the Colorado State Normal School, established in 1889.
During the middle of the 19th century, normal schools were established throughout the U.S. and other countries. They were the predecessors to modern teachers’ colleges. Some served only to prepare primary school teachers, while other normal schools prepared primary, secondary, and tertiary teachers. For some reason, we don’t say tertiary any more, but to me it makes more sense than the current vogue term, postsecondary.
The term “normal school” probably comes from the French phrase école normale, which goes back to about the same time Napoleon was in school. It was supposed to be a place where “…citizens…already schooled in the useful sciences should be taught to teach.” OK, ouch.
In the United States, early normal schools were a way to produce qualified teachers for schools that needed them. The statesman Horace Mann was a big fan. At the dedication of the normal school in Lexington, Massachusetts, he said, “I believe Normal Schools to be a new instrumentality in the advancement of the race. I believe that, without them, Free Schools themselves would be shorn of their strength and their healing power and would at length become mere charity schools and thus die out in fact and in form.”
Of course, normal schools weren’t the only idea out there for how to solve the teacher shortage. They emphasized a practical, boots-on-the-ground approach to teaching teachers. Many normal schools included laboratory schools with real children. And that didn’t appeal to the classical sensibilities promoted by the college men of the day. Some normal schools lasted only a few years. Others started out as normal schools, but changed their approach and philosophy as fads changed in education. Some, like my alma mater, later became universities. You are probably familiar with the California State Normal School, although now you call it UCLA.
And perhaps the major question that eventually killed the normal school concept is one that we still haven’t answered well: Should teachers be experts in their respective academic fields – math, science, music, literature – or should they be experts in teaching? Of course, we would like to have both, and sometimes we don’t get either. But if you had to choose one, back in the late 1800s, which would you want? A college-educated teacher who was an expert, focused on dispensing his or her wisdom on algebra or English or anatomy? Or would you choose a teacher from a normal school: a teacher who might not know as many facts and figures, theories and philosophies, but who has practical experience and focuses on helping students learn how to think – a teacher whose profession and passion is simply teaching?
In the 21st century, we’re facing a new type of teacher shortage. In some places, maybe schools have been almost “shorn of their strength and their healing power.” It’s no secret that great teachers are hard to find and keep, especially in rural areas and inner cities. And while salary is one part of the equation, it’s not the whole story. Now, in order to teach, an aspiring young teacher needs to attend a 4-year college or university and navigate a maze of state requirements and tests. This is good, right? We don’t want unqualified hacks just walking in and teaching chemistry.
But consider the small-town girl – let’s call her Emily, because that was the most popular name when this year’s high school seniors were born. She’s the one who is inspired by a particular teacher, or maybe a basketball coach or drama director. She’s the one who, sitting in the third row of a history class on a Tuesday, has a lightbulb moment and thinks, “I want to do this for a living.” Consider what it takes to make that dreamer into a teacher. See Emily scraping together the money and signing for the loans, navigating a campus with more people than her entire county back home. Maintaining that desire to teach over the four years or more she spends away. Then coming home to find that a small-town school looks a little different from the other side of the desk. Consider what she must give up front, in order to give for the rest of her career.
And now imagine how the scene changes if Emily can get that education closer to home. A degree can still be a good ticket out of town if she wants to use it that way, but maybe she’ll choose to stay – to teach and coach and contribute to her community, and to watch the lightbulb switch on for the next generation of Emilys.
It might not be time to start building normal schools in rural areas like they did in the 1890s. In a world where most of our collective human knowledge can be accessed from a cheap cell phone, resurrecting the methods of the 19th century is probably not the answer. But in the 21st century (and we still have a lot of century left), maybe we can build better ways to recruit and prepare a new army of great teachers. Maybe we can break down the barriers that keep new teachers out and make experienced teachers leave. Maybe, amid the disorienting influences of our shining new age, we can engineer a new type of normal.
___
Sources:
http://www.weldcounty150.org/EducationinWeldCounty/UniversityofNorthernColorado.html
http://www.unco.edu/pres/sh.htm
http://mje.mcgill.ca/index.php/MJE/article/viewFile/7991/5919
https://www3.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/normal.html