The earliest teacher training schools were the so-called Lehrseminarien in the German states. The first one was opened in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, in 1756, and by the end of the eighteenth century, Prussia boasted a state-supported network which included thirty major seminaries and eleven auxiliary ones, each having between fifty and a hundred pupils. The first seminary for female schoolteachers in western Germany was established in Koblenz in 1784, although such establishments remained exceedingly rare.

In France, the first écoles normales for the training of primary school-teachers, called instituteurs or institutrices with official state sponsorship were opened in the 1820s; by the early 1840s, the départements with state encouragement and aid had opened 76 normal schools for men and 16 for women, enrolling 3,012 and 283 pupils, respectively. In England, training colleges became a serious state project finally in the 1840s, and the establishment of the Queen's Scholarship made them available to poor but ambitious offspring of farming and working-class families. Indeed, this provision of training at little cost was a central part of the program everywhere. The schools were designed to attract pupils who would see the teaching profession as an avenue of mobility from manual labor. Their design was to provide a limited education and to produce graduates who would know enough to teach, but who would be neither too haughty nor too ambitious for the life of a country schoolteacher. Both the curricula at the normal schools and the pattern of recruitment and training reflected these ends.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 64 - 65)