THE PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS. 797 



pil's mind ; and there would not be much opportunity to increase 

 his success by careful observation and study of a large number of 

 children. The first recognition of teaching as an art, founded upon 

 a rather indefinite science of the mind, seems to have been shown 

 by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, when they required 

 every individual who should teach in their schools to spend two 

 or three years as an apprentice, observing the ways of a master, 

 who was supposed to have become familiar with the best art of 

 teaching through his own experience in observation and experi- 

 mentation. Later, Ratich urged that teaching was an art, and 

 that those who were to practice it must become familiar with its 

 rules and devices before trying it, lest those whom they should 

 attempt to instruct should suffer by their ignorance and unskill- 

 fulness until experience should have taught them wisdom. In 

 the eighteenth century Francke embodied this idea in his schools 

 at Halle, requiring that all his teachers should, before being fully 

 admitted to the profession, spend two or three years in observing 

 others teach, and in reflecting upon the difficulties to be met with 

 and devising means to overcome them. This was the forerunner 

 of the " teacher's seminary," which has latterly spread through- 

 out Germany and all the progressive countries of Europe ; and 

 which has crossed over the waters to our own land, where a dif- 

 ferent name has been taken, but where the same ends are aimed 

 at. Previous to 1833 there were in France, according to Guizot, 

 forty-seven primary normal schools, while at present there are one 

 hundred and seventy-one well-equipped institutions, all of which 

 have become governmental institutions. In 1827 David Stowe 

 established the first normal seminary in Great Britain, at Glas- 

 gow ; and such great popularity did this attain that other institu- 

 tions of the same kind sprang up rapidly throughout Scotland and 

 England, while training colleges and professorships of pedagogy 

 in the universities have also been established. The first normal 

 school in our own country began operations at Lexington, Mass., 

 in 1829, and now there is not a State in the Union that has not sev- 

 eral of these schools, supported at public expense ; while normal 

 colleges and professorships of pedagogy are meeting with favor 

 and multiplying in all parts of the country. 



In America there is a problem to be met in the training of 

 teachers that gives very little trouble to many of the countries of 

 the Old World. In Germany, Austria, France, and the other im- 

 portant nations of Europe, teaching has come to be regarded as a 

 profession which, when an individual once enters, he rarely de- 

 serts, holding to it for life the same as if he had engaged in the 

 practice of medicine or law. The population of these countries is 

 practically constant, making it possible to determine pretty defi- 

 nitely about how many teachers will be required each year to 



