UW Oshkosh: The Normal School That Taught Wisconsin to Teach

When the Oshkosh State Normal School opened in eighteen seventy-one, it was only the third institution of its kind in Wisconsin. A normal school, in the educational vocabulary of the nineteenth century, was a school for teachers, a place where young men and women learned the methods of the classroom before going out to fill the schoolhouses of a growing state. Wisconsin had decided it needed more of them, and Oshkosh was the chosen site.

The school opened with eight faculty members and forty-three enrolled students. President George Albee led that first class. Tuition was free, but only to students who declared their intention to teach in Wisconsin public schools. The school existed to produce teachers, not broadly educated citizens. That was the mission, and it was taken seriously.

Within a decade, the Oshkosh Normal School was already pushing the boundaries of its mandate. In eighteen seventy-two, a member of the model school department named Rose Swart introduced what may have been the first systematic practice teaching in any American normal school. She put student teachers in front of real students before they graduated, an innovation so obvious in retrospect that it is astonishing it needed to be invented. In eighteen eighty, the school established the first kindergarten at a public normal school in the United States.

Over the following century, the institution grew, renamed itself multiple times, and in nineteen seventy-one, its centennial year, became the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, a full comprehensive university serving tens of thousands of students. The campus today is a busy place, its buildings spread across a site much larger than the six acres of eighteen seventy-one. But the original mission still echoes in the college of education, training teachers for Wisconsin classrooms the way Rose Swart once stood in front of a room and showed student-teachers how it was done.