Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1917 — Untitled [ARTICLE]

That the training of teachers was an integral part of the system of the Jesuits, the order established by Ignatius Loyola in 1522, is generally recognized. The monsatic superior of the province was compelled, in-the selection of teachers, to “take heed to those who see mto be best-fitted for the palce,” and to sfelect from among the most promising students “as many life-long teachers as possible,” exhorting those especially fitted to form' a “iiursery” - for the preparation of teachers, under the direction of trained professors. Meanwhile Luther, according to Prof, Pearson’s review, was laying the foundation for a system of pedagogical instruction in Germany. In 1681 the celebrated Abbe de la Salle established a theological teachers’ training school at Rheims, France. A little Later the pattern or model school idea of Germany was given a new meaning when Franke breathed a new spirit into the German system. With the foundation of the Orphan House —-at Halle in 1696, and the schools connected with it, arose the necessity for trained teachers. —To moot this need, Franke, in 1697, founded a teachers’ class “by providing a table or free board for such poor students as stood in need-of assistance, and selecting, a few years later, out of the whole number, 12 who exhibited the right basis of piety, skill, and desire for teaching,” and constituting them his “Seminarium Praeceptoroium.” In return for this gratuitous training, these pu-pil-teachers bound themselves to teach for three years in the schools of the Orphon House after completing their course. This was the first regularly organized exclusive teachers’ seminary -in Europe. From all parts of Europe students flocked to Halle to catch the inspiration of Franke’s spirit. Back to all parts of Europe was carried the idea of the teacher’s seminary. Hecker, a pupil of Franke, founded the first seminary for primary teachers in Prussia in 1735. In 1748 he established a similar school in Berlin. The graduates of this school were considered so far superior to untrained teachers that Frederic the Great enjoined by special ordinance that no others should be employed on the Crown lands of the Kingdom. Rousseau in France, Locke in England, Peztalozzi in Switzerland and Germany, Filbiger in Austria, and Kindermann in Bohemia are among the great missionaries wro accepted and glorified the teacher-training idea in Europe. The teachers’ seminary for the elementary schools was not long divorced from the pattern or model school. Both had sprung into existence from the same impulse. The normal schools of both France and Germany combined judiciously the seminary and pattern school idea, thus offering the study of a definite body of pedagogical thought in the amatheories of education” in the “pattern” school, which thus became the correlating center of the normal school. The modem normal school, with its training department constructed about the model, or practice scrod, is the finished product of long, steady development.