Teacher seminar
The teacher training seminar was a special form of teacher training in the 19th and 20th centuries, when schools were still separated according to sex and teacher training (for elementary school teachers ) did not take place at universities but at seminars .
A distinction was made between seminars for future elementary school teachers and seminars that prepared for the higher female teacher examination (ie for teaching at higher girls’s schools ). As a rule, the latter were not state but private institutions. Both forms of the female teachers 'seminar, like the male teachers' seminar, were mostly housed in a boarding school with an attached practice school. The duration was usually three to six years, depending on the qualification sought, plus a two-year preparatory course for preparers .
In terms of cultural history, the seminar for female teachers has become especially important as a possibility for advanced and vocational training for middle-class women in the late 19th century. Many of the women of this time who are known today as women's rights activists , writers or other culturally significant personalities (e.g. Anita Augspurg , Gertrud Bäumer , Minna Cauer , Elisabeth Dauthendey , Hedwig Dohm , Helene Lange , Fanny zu Reventlow , Auguste Schmidt , Lisbeth Wirtson , Clara Zetkin ) escaped their fate as senior daughters mainly by attending a teacher’s seminar, which, in addition to higher education, enabled them to gain financial independence through employment.
However, employment was generally tied to celibacy (→ female teacher celibacy ). The address of the primary school teacher as " Miss " - the traditional form of address for unmarried women - until the second half of the 20th century is a holdover from this. If a teacher married, she had to retire from work ex officio. This so-called celibacy clause was in effect until 1957, when it was declared invalid by the Federal Labor Court .