Teacher Education

Kathryn Kinnucan-Welsch

The evolving history of the role of teacher education in the United States reflects the changing purposes and characteristics of schools and schooling. Schools in the United States from colonial times to the middle of the 19th century were primarily focused on the basics of reading, writing, and skills in arithmetic. Values important to the emerging nation were clearly evident in daily lessons often conducted as group and individual recitations. During those years, most teachers in both rural and urban areas had no training for their position, and teachers often had little more than an eighth-grade education. Schoolmasters in the Latin grammar schools in major population centers, however, were often graduates of liberal arts study at universities founded in the early days of the new nation. Teaching was often a temporary position taken by men on their way to other callings or by women until marriage. By the mid-1800s, common ...

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