Organization of teacher education in the 20th century
News •
The educational doctrines that inspired, conceptualized, and legitimated this transformation themselves reflected other social, political, economic, demographic, and technological changes. Urbanization, the reduction of infant mortality, improvements in child health, the fact that families, individuals, and whole societies could afford longer and better schooling, growth in the size of populations, greater capacity for control by central and local government, the availability of new kinds of educational apparatus and teaching aids—all these did much to shape the progress of teacher education during the decades after 1900.
Among the countries of the world the arrangements for the preparation of teachers vary widely. In some countries “monitors” still receive short courses of training as their preparation to teach large classes of young children. In North America, and to an increasing extent in other developed countries, most teachers are university graduates who begin their teacher preparation after completing four to six years of secondary education. Between these extremes many other arrangements exist. At one level, which for present purposes might be called Normal School A, entry is prior to the usual age of completion of secondary education. Training is limited to the achievement of competence in teaching a range of the subjects taught at the primary level and does not last more than five years.
The second level, which may be called Normal School B, also begins prior to the age of completing secondary education but usually after the “first certificate” at approximately age 16 or at the end of the period of compulsory schooling. This level provides combined courses of education and professional training, the former not necessarily limited to subjects taught at the primary level and extending beyond the usual age of completion of secondary education.
A third level, the college level, requires a full secondary education, usually ending at 18 but not necessarily with the same qualifications as are demanded of university entrants. Two- or three-year concurrent courses of general and professional education lead to the award of a teaching certificate, often valid for work in primary, intermediate, and lower secondary schools.
Finally, there is the university level, in which, after completing a full period of secondary education, the future teacher enters a multipurpose institution of higher education to follow three- to five-year courses of combined general education and professional training, the latter being either concurrent or consecutive, that lead to the award of a university degree and teaching qualification. Such qualification is considered valid for work at primary or secondary levels, or at both, according to the nature of the course followed.
Until the middle 1960s the normal-school pattern applied to students preparing for primary work in many European countries (Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey), in Latin America, and in a number of Asian countries, although in many places there was more than one route to the attainment of qualified teacher status. The education and training of secondary school teachers was complicated by the general growth of secondary education for all. This encouraged the tendency to educate and train both primary and secondary teachers alongside one another in postsecondary colleges or in multipurpose universities. More recently there has been a widespread movement away from the types of training described here as Normal School A and B to the college and university patterns. But the fact that a country has adopted what has been called here the university pattern of training should not be taken to mean that all the institutions in which teachers are prepared are comparable to the pre-existing universities; some are devoted mainly to teacher preparation.
Issues and problems in teacher education
In nearly all countries, courses of the Normal School B, college, and university categories contain three main elements. The first element is the study of one or more academic, cultural, or aesthetic subjects for the purpose both of continuing the student’s own education and of providing him with knowledge to use in his subsequent teaching career. A second element is the study of educational principles, increasingly organized in terms of social science disciplines such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history. A third element consists of professional courses and school experience. Primary teachers may also receive instruction in the content and methods of subjects other than their own specialties that figure in the primary curriculum. In normal schools and colleges, and some universities, the three elements run parallel to one another, and the student is professionally committed from the outset of his course. Elsewhere, the study of educational processes and professional work (including school experience) may follow the completion of a period of academic study that the student has begun without any prior commitment to teaching as a career. There are still advanced countries where the possession of a university degree, without any qualification in education as such, is sufficient basis for the award of qualified teacher status. In England and Wales, for example, compulsory training for graduates, generally comprising two terms (six months) of professional and theoretical studies and a further three-month period of school experience, was scheduled to come into effect only in 1973.
General education
The sequencing, balance, content, and organization of general and specialist academic work, courses in education, and professional studies and teaching experience has been a subject of discussion since the earliest days of organized teacher education. The importance of the element of general education has been defended on various grounds. Sometimes such academic work may be highly specialized. Students in many colleges of education in England study only one principal subject, to which they devote about one-third of their total time, and teachers who graduate from universities have often pursued three-year courses for single-subject honours degrees. In the United States and elsewhere the academic element is broader, and the first two years of college or university work may embody a wide range of elective subjects from diverse disciplinary fields. Both patterns have their critics, the first because it produces narrow intellectual specialists, the second because it encourages dilettantism and inadequate depth. Where a pattern of electives is combined with a units/credits system, as in some universities in Japan and the United States, it is claimed that one result is an undesirable fragmentation of study and effort. In his influential Education of American Teachers (1963), James B. Conant recommended that half the course requirements of the four-year program of preparation for elementary teachers should be given over to general courses, a further quarter to an “area of concentration,” and the remaining quarter to professional studies, including school experience. Prospective secondary teachers would spend still more time on the subjects they were preparing to teach, with less than 10 percent of their time devoted to practice teaching and special methods. Such a subject emphasis for secondary teachers can be found in many countries. In France the École Normale Supérieure still places freedom of study and the nurture of intellectual curiosity above questions of professional teacher training. Generally speaking, wherever there is a stress upon academic excellence and the achievement of high standards of scholarship, there is likely to be skepticism as to the claims of professional training for teaching. Oxford University had still not appointed a professor of education by the beginning of the 1970s.
In countries where technical or vocational education forms an important part of secondary school provision, there have sometimes been specialist institutions for the training of teachers for this work. Such teachers tend to have lower status than the secondary school staff who teach academic subjects, and efforts have been made to upgrade the position of the teacher of agricultural and industrial arts, home economics, and handicrafts. Nearly all the universities in England and Wales that now offer the bachelor of education degree for college of education students include technical subjects within their list of approved options.
The element of educational courses in the teacher preparation program has been the object of criticism from academic specialists, defenders of liberal culture, and practical-minded professional educators. The growing range of speculation and empirical data generated by the burgeoning social sciences, philosophy, and history, have provided a rich ore from which those responsible for teacher preparation mined the materials they needed for the construction and legitimation of their pedagogic systems and principles. But such borrowing has done little to establish any very coherent system of educational ideas, or to provide the basis for a systematic theory of teaching adequate to sustain the variety and complexity of teacher preparation programs. In his Evolution of American Educational Theory (1964), C.J. Brauner was forced to conclude that
middleman theorists, inexpert as scholars, had naïvely striven for some impossible synthesis that would be at once faithful to scholarship, useful to the practitioner, intelligible to the populace and thus comprehensive as a discipline, workable as a general method, and defensible as a social institution.
