Excerpt from Elementary Education In considering the reasons for the increase of the length Of the term Of the elementary school and its adoption of a graded course of study, one comes upon the most important item Of improvement that belongs to the recent history Of education, namely, the introduction of professionally trained teachers. The first normal school established in the United States recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was founded at Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1839. The num ber of public normal schools supported by the state or municipal governments has increased since that year to 167, enrolling students, and graduating nearly per annum. To this number are to be added 1 78 private normal schools, with an aggregate of students and graduates. In 1880 there were 240 normal school students in each million of inhabitants; in 1897 there were 936, or nearly four times as many in each million. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.