OREGON NORMAL SCHOOLS 111
inexperienced teachers, was inferior to that of the public school. Discipline was as a rule considered more lax in the training department. On the other hand, some parents desired that their children attend the training school, and stoutly upheld the opinion that the quality of instruction there given was second to none. The Ashland Normal, being located two miles from the city, (after the construction of the new building) operated with considerably less relationship to the city schools than in the other schools. Ashland was confronted with the necessity, however, of finding pupils for its practice school, and that all was not harmony seems evident from the follow- ing quotation from the first catalogue announcing the estab- lishment of the training department:
"The pupils of this department are of the best element of the city. Pupils who use bad language and those who are apt to disregard the best rules of discipline are not given admis- sion. This is a select school where parents may feel perfectly safe in sending their children. Here is avoided the contami- nation of those vulgar influences which are so often tolerated in the public school/'
This idea of exclusiveness must have had an especially strong appeal to the ambitious parent.
By the close of the year 1885 the two normals at Monmouth and Ashland were in running order. That year State Super- intendent E. B. McElroy reported to the legislature :
"The requirements of the law in prescribing a course of study to be pursued by the students in the normal schools, as well as the rules and regulations for their government, have been complied with."
Looking upon this as so much accomplished, he turned his attention to a demand for a normal school which had arisen in Eastern Oregon. In the same report, Mr. McElroy said there were 300 teachers required for the districts east of the Cascades, that the population was rapidly increasing, and there- fore there would soon be many more needed. Private acad-
