The Teachers’ Course in Arithmetic in the Normal School: A Plea for Professionalized Subject Matter

Abstract

What training is necessary to prepare high-school graduates to teach arithmetic and other subjects in the modern elementary school? This question has come to be a very important one in every normal school and particularly in those normal schools which still have a two-year course at the end of which the students accept positions to teach. This question is a difficult one to answer because teachers to-day need a much broader professional training than formerly. One attempt to solve this problem has been to increase the length of the normal-school course from two years to four years, but even in those schools where the four-year course exists comparatively few students remain to complete it, the large majority accepting positions after finishing the two-year or three-year curricula offered in those schools. Hence, how to Prepare students in two or three years to teach effectively in elementary schools is still a vital question in practically all our normal schools.