41 Teacher Education
History of Teacher Education
by Rebeca Coleman
Learning Targets
Students should be able to understand the beginnings of teacher education, starting in the ancient times.
Students should understand the progression from few requirements to many requirements to teach.
Introduction
Teacher education has changed quite a bit over the last few hundred years. Teachers have gone from scholars to men and women in a schoolroom to trained educators from specific schools. Over time though, the gift of being able to teach stayed true in those teachers.
Before the Seventeenth Century
In earlier times, priests and prophets taught noble and wealthy children skills that were needed to excel in business and politics. Priests were treated well because of their great knowledge. The first private teacher was Confucius in the fifth century BCE. In Ancient Greece, knowledge was considered very sacred and the same ideology passed through the time of Christianity. Education was not very popular among lower classes of people until after the Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic Church took responsibility and created centers of learning, which eventually became the great universities of Europe, including Cambridge (John’s 2003).
The Beginnings of Specific Training
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“Children are guilty of unpardonable rudeness when they spit in the face of a companion; neither are they excusable who spit from windows or on walls or furniture.” St. John Baptist de la Salle (de la Salle, 1695)
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Specific teacher training originated in France in 1685 by St. John Baptist de la Salle (Teacher 2007). The training spread through Europe through the monitorial system, which is the method of education where there are number of students at a bench, a monitor (older student) who is instructed by the teacher and then instructs the younger students, and then the teacher (Teacher 2007). It spread through Europe thanks to August Hermann Francke and Johann Pestalozzi. It came to the United States in the early 1800s through this system (Teacher 2007). Schools could be a student’s room in a wealthy household or a one-room schoolhouse for poorer groups of children.
Teacher Education Moves to the United States
Teachers were predominantly male before the early 1800s. Men were taught to read and write from the early days of language, and women were not taught very widely until the nineteenth century. This made it very difficult for them to teach. If a person could read and write, that person was basically qualified to teach. Teachers were chosen based on their moral quality by the local government (John’s 2003).
In the 1820s, teacher training became important in the universities and academies in the United States. Women could only be taught in teacher training academies, while men could be taught in universities (History 2007). Samuel Hall created the first private normal after-high school teaching school which taught teachers in 1823. The first government funded normal school was created in Massa