Normal+Schools

Brief overview-
Normal schools were created to train future teachers. Normal schools first appeared in the United State, in Massachusetts in the late 1830's. The schools were called "normal" schools because the founders wanted to set norms for what teachers taught along with how teachers were educated. This name has disappeared within the U.S. and the normal schools have turned into universities, such as the Farmington Normal School has become the University of Maine at Farmington. Even though these schools have undergone a name change they still tend to educate future teachers.

What we believed before the shift-
We believed that teachers did not need to be highly educated. Teachers tended to be unmarried women that graduated from high school. They did not need to be highly qualified to teach their students. At the time most people didn't tend to believe that education was extremely important. So for rural schools trained teahcers were thought to be unneeded because the students were not in school for that long and were not educated in a lot of different areas. The basics where fine. People didn't understand the need for trained teachers when the teachers they had were doing just fine.

What we believed after-
We believed that all teachers should be educated. There should be certain criteria or norms that all teachers should meet. People started to really care about their child’s education, and thus decided that the better educated the teacher, the better educated their child would be. Normal Schools created standards that all teachers should have to meet to be able to teach. Standards have since become apart of teacher certification. Teachers now have to meet certain standards to be able to teach in any public school.

How do we act as if the shift didn't happen?-
I don't think we act at all like this didn't happen. Teaching standards keep climbing. Though if a child is home schooled their teacher does not need to have gone to college to become a teacher. But in most circumstances teachers these days have to have gone to college, and pass multiple tests to make sure they are qualified to teach.

Resources-
The History of UMF [|http://www.farmington.edu/about/history-umf.php?location=about]

Normal school [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_school]

normal school: Definition and Much More from Answers.com [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_school]