UCLA, when it first was created as the Southern Branch of the University of California, operated in an old state "normal" school on Vermont Avenue where LA City College is now located. If you have been in that neighborhood, you may have noted that LACC is at the corner of Vermont and Normal Street. Above is a photo of the California State Normal School. (Normal schools were teacher training institutions. A quick internet, dictionary, and encyclopedia search failed to determine why they were called "normal.")
UPDATE: The comment by Andy Sabl seems to have it right. Normal school is a translation of the French "école normale." Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary says that the name "normal" stems from "the fact that the first French school so named was intended to serve as a model."
According to the OED, this use of "normal" dates back to 1826 in the United States.
ReplyDeleteThe usage may have come from France: the 1836 dictionary of the French Academy lists the chief meaning of "normal" as "of the schools intended to train teachers for public education."
(http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=normal#ACAD1835)
But the term goes back further: the famous École Normale Supérieure was (if one trusts Wikipedia) founded in 1794 during the Revolution to train a new (secular) cadre of teachers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Normale_Sup%C3%A9rieure
I may look this up in the old Larousse (not online) when I can. I suspect that "normal" originally meant "lay": those trained in the school were to teach without being in holy orders, contrary to the former religious monopoly on education.