The first state normal school in the United States, the forerunner to today's Framingham State University, opens in Lexington, Massachusetts with three students.
Framingham State University (Framingham State or FSU) is a public university in Framingham, Massachusetts. It offers undergraduate programs as well as graduate programs, including MBA, MEd, and MS.
A normal school is an institution created to train teachers by educating them in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum. In the 19th century in the United States, instruction in normal schools was at the high school level, turning out primary school teachers. Most such schools are now called "teacher-training colleges" or "teachers' colleges", require a high school diploma, and may be part of a comprehensive university. Normal schools in the United States, Canada and Argentina trained teachers for primary schools, while in continental Europe, the equivalent colleges educated teachers for primary, secondary and tertiary schools.In 1685, St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normal school, the École Normale, in Reims, Champagne, France. The term "normal" herein refers to the goal of these institutions to instill and reinforce particular norms within students. "Norms" included historical behavioral norms of the time, as well as norms that reinforced targeted societal values, ideologies and dominant narratives in the form of curriculum.
The first public normal school in the United States was founded in Concord, Vermont, by Samuel Read Hall in 1823 to train teachers. In 1839, the first state-supported normal school was established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the northeast corner of the historic Lexington Battle Green; it evolved into Framingham State University. The first modern teacher training school in China was established by educator Sheng Xuanhuai in 1895 as the normal school of the Nanyang Public School (now Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in Shanghai during the Qing dynasty.Many comprehensive public or state-supported universities, such as the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States and Beijing Normal University in China, were established and operated as normal schools before expanding their faculties and organizing as research universities. Some of these universities, particularly in Asia, retain the word "Normal" in their name to recognize their historical purpose. In Canada, most normal schools were eventually assimilated into a university as its faculty of education, offering a one or two-year Bachelor of Education degree. Such a degree requires at least three, but usually four, years of prior undergraduate study.