page_title: Normal school
section_title: 1839 - Lexington Normal School, Lexington, Massachusetts
hierarchical_section_title: Normal school / North and South America / United States / 1839 - Lexington Normal School, Lexington, Massachusetts
caption_attribution_description: English: Simon W Robinson Masonic Lodge, Lexington Massachusetts
context_page_description: A normal school is an institution created to train high school graduates to be teachers by educating them in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum. Most such schools, where they still exist, are now denominated "teacher-training colleges" or "teachers' colleges" and may be organized as part of a comprehensive university. Normal schools in the United States and Canada trained teachers for primary schools, while in continental Europe, the equivalent colleges educated teachers for primary, secondary and tertiary schools.
  In 1685, St. Jean-Baptiste 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, Champagne, France. The term "normal" herein 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.
context_section_description: Sixteen years after Columbian School had been founded in Vermont, the first state-funded normal school was founded in the neighboring state of Massachusetts, thanks largely to the efforts of education reformers such as Horace Mann and James G. Carter. In 1844 that school moved from its original site of Lexington to  West Newton, and then in 1853 to Framingham. Today, Framingham State University is recognized as the oldest, continuously operated public normal school in the United States. Anna Brackett attended this University and was a teacher - later to become the first woman principal of a teacher's college.
caption: Site of the first public normal school
  in the United States,
  in Lexington, Massachusetts
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