Normal School

A normal school is a school created to train high school graduates to be teachers. Its purpose is to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name. Most such schools are now called teachers' colleges; however, in some places the term normal school is still used.

In 1685, John Baptist de La Salle, founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normal school, the École Normale, in Reims. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, normal schools in the United States and Canada trained primary school teachers, while in Europe normal schools educated primary, secondary and tertiary-level teachers. The first public normal school in the United States was founded in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1839. It operates today as Framingham State University.

In the United States teacher colleges or normal schools began to call themselves universities beginning in the 1960s. For instance, Southern Illinois University was formerly known as Southern Illinois Normal College. The university enrolls more than 26,000 students and has its own university press but still issues most of its bachelor degrees in education. Similarly, the town of Normal, Illinois takes its names from the former name of Illinois State University.

Many famous state universities such as the University of California, Los Angeles were founded as normal schools. In Canada such institutions were typically assimilated by a university as their Faculty of Education offering a one- or two-year Bachelor of Education program. It requires at least three (usually four) years of prior undergraduate studies.