Normal Schools Revisited: A Theoretical Reinterpretation of the Historiography of Normal Schools

This article provides a theory-driven account of the emergence, development, and ultimate disappearance of the normal school as a unique institutional form within higher education. To that end, this article engages new institutionalism in order to construct a composite narrative from the historiography of teacher education that counters the cursory treatment of normal schools in popular and widely used synthetic histories of higher education. This article also responds to the challenge of better integrating normal schools into the historiography of higher education and suggests future avenues for theory-driven history.