Bridgewater State University - Beginning of The Teaching Normal School

Beginning of The Teaching Normal School

In a time when there were no trained teachers, men and woman established and developed that education was a discipline in itself and that good teachers could be trained to provide good educational leadership. On September 9, 1840, Bridgewater Teaching Normal School was in session. The school building was located in the basement of the Old Bridgewater Town Hall being one-story and forty feet by fifty feet. Inside three rooms were divided by dividers. The rooms consisted of an ante room for students, an apparatus room, and a classroom. The first to come were twenty-one woman and seven men.

Mr. Nicholas Tillinghast, was the first principal (1840–1853) and only instructor of the school. Having strong foundations of teaching by preparing at Lexington a year earlier, he realized how to address problems easily establishing Bridgewater institution as a permanent location.

School years consisted of two terms for fourteen weeks each, students not required to attend consecutively. In 1845, the Commonwealth finally agreed to construct the first normal state school (Bridgewater State Normal School) building in America becoming the educational plant for almost half a century and the first building ever erected in the United States for the preparation of teachers.

The building was wooden, two-stories high, and sixty-four feet by forty-two feet accommodating eighty-four scholars. There were small and large classrooms, with blackboards in each. Since changes were made to the school, the board of Education required people to attend three terms for fourteen consecutive weeks, establishing a year’s course. This was a turning point in history. It was then known as a professional standard for the preparation of teachers, breaking away from traditional academics for attendance. Although it was the next step of establishing different schools for specific purposes, unrelated to academics.

A “Normal School” was the specific name of Bridgewater because of an important report on European progress in elementary education (evaluated France). The reports were good having a great influence in France, where it brought about in 1833, the beginnings of the first national elementary-school system, which included thirty schools for training of teachers, patterned after the Prussian models. Because of the many schools the French called them “Normal Schools”. It influenced leaders in Massachusetts who were agitating the establishment of schools for the training of better teachers.

Horace Mann, also called “Father of the Normal School Movement,” founded Bridgewater State College in 1840 making it the oldest permanently located institution of public higher education in Massachusetts. Mann’s goal was to create schools to train teachers and educators. Today Bridgewater, which is regarded as the "home of teacher education in America," has the largest enrollment of teacher education students in the Commonwealth.

There were, however, criticisms at every corner. People complained that the talent which applied for training was not the best, the course was too brief and the equipment was too limited. There were many academies that offered better opportunities for scholarship, and these institutions were not friendly. The teachers already at work interpreted every argument for trained teachers as a reflection of themselves.

The project of the Normal School was disturbed, even threatened, by the irritation of religious intolerance, and by the contempt of many teachers and school committees. It was an experiment carried on with expected failure. In the early history of the Schools it was difficult for the graduates to find a chance to teach. They were looked upon with some suspicion. The Schools gradually made themselves known and felt in the community through their graduates, some who signally failed, but a large majority satisfied all reasonable expectations.

The State Teachers Institutes held by the Board were valuable to Normal-School work. They magnified the importance of popular education, and strengthened the schools in public esteem. They encouraged the teachers to attend the Normal Schools, and the school authorities to employ trained teachers.

The programs offered at Bridgewater Normal School was elementary subjects, expansion of elementary subjects such as math, philosophy, and literary, the art of teaching which included instruction in the philosophy of teaching and discipline, as drawn from the nature and condition of the juvenile mind, and as much exercises in teaching under constant supervision as the circumstances and interests of the Model Schools would allow. These were all created by Mr. Nicolas Tillinghast. The schedule for students where on one sheet. Depending of the class resulted the time and days of learning.

The First State Normal School Building in America was dedicated in Bridgewater, August 19, 1846. Horace Mann (Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education) a proud noted educator said: “Among all the lights and shadows that ever crossed my path, this day’s radiance is the brightest...I consider this event as marking an era in the progress of education-which as we all know is the progress of civilization-on this western continent, and throughout the world. It is the completion of the first normal schoolhouse ever erected in Massachusetts,-in the Union,-in this hemisphere. It belongs to.” This passage explains the accomplishment Bridgewater Normal State School had made in only a short amount of time.