Rise And Growth Of The Normal School Idea In The United States

Excerpt from Rise and Growth of the Normal-School Idea in the United States Sir: The accompanying circular, entitled the "Rise and Growth of the Normal-School Idea in (he United States," is the work of Prof. J. P. Gordy, incumbent of the chair of pedagogy in the Ohio University, at Athens, and for some time editor of an excellent "Journal of Pedagogy." The task which the author has here set himself is, "to trace the growth and development of the normal idea in the United States." He explains his theme more fully, as follows: "Probably no two students would agree precisely as to the elements that enter into this development. The greater their disagreement, the more widely, of course, would they differ as to the institutions in which these elements first appeared. As the author conceives it, the first form in which the normal idea appeared in this country was the belief that the teacher needs special preparation, but that this special preparation consists in the simple addition of the study of certain subjects to the training required for the professions or for business, and, in his opinion, the institutions in which this idea was embodied were the New York academies. This erroneous conception, as the author deems it, gave place to the truer idea - that the proper preparation of the teacher requires not only a mastery of the art and science of education, as far as that is possible, but a thorough grounding in the subjects he is to teach - that the knowledge of a subject that suffices for the citizen does not suffice for the teacher. This idea, he conceives, was embodied in the normal schools of Massachusetts in the beginning. But while these schools had a definite conception that there is a science of education, they did not formulate their ideas as to what that science is. The normal school at Oswego, it appeals to the author, took a step towards determining that science and making explicit the art that should be based upon it. That institution taught that the only nourishment of the mind is realities, and that the whole work of the teacher consists in bringing the mind into contact with the appropriate realities. But. this school left to the uneducated tact of the teacher the decision of the question as to what realities arc appropriate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Pedagogy, both the discipline and the word itself, has had a tortured history. It has been used as a synonym for practice and acquired negative connotations that confuse it with pedantry, conferring low status on those associated with it (school teachers and professors of education). In the 1880s, for example, most university professors of pedagogy made a concerted effort to replace the term with education. In the 1960s, however, pedagogy surfaced again as an alternative to education in academic departments that had once openly ridiculed it. But pedagogy’s fractured meaning cannot be explained away as a matter of technical jargon or political fashion. To do so conceals the power struggles between scholars and professional teachers that continue to this day. In this unusual and unprecedented volume, Salvatori uses pedagogy as a key term for understanding how American education evolved in the early twentieth century. She traces its contested meaning in a fascinating group of documents - dictionary and encyclopedia definitions, early treatises on pedagogy, professional literature, and debates about “the place” of pedagogy - and offers a critical framework for reading them. The past that these documents uncover, Salvatori hopes, will incite sustained and responsible critical investigation of current institutional, political, and theoretical interests that, by continuing to construct pedagogy as essentially practical, a-theoretical, and anti-intellectual, simultaneously justify its ancillary status to theory within the academy.