Normal institutes trained teachers, chiefly for the elementary grades, and students at Sam Houston Normal Institute after the turn of the century prepared for their roles as instructors and educators by visiting the city's public schools to discuss teaching methods and witness teaching first-hand.
Around 1879 there was some sort of "model school" housed in a temporary building in the vicinity of the campus; it was gone by 1882 [1]. By 1912, SHNI opened a first grade school on the campus; two years later nine grades were meeting on the SHNI campus, mainly for demonstrating current trends and methods in teaching. These classes met in what was referred to as the "Training School Building," essentially just a quickly overcrowding Austin College Building. As a result it became necessary to create a separate structure for education.
The Education Building, the campus's seventh building, was constructed at a cost of $80,000 at what was then the far southern end of the quadrangle, south of the Administration Building, constructed two years before. This demonstration school contained, "a gymnasium, shops for manual arts, and domestic science laboratories in addition to the usual classrooms [1]." Certain classrooms were of a larger-than-normal size to allow students to sit behind the children's desks and see the lesson from a different point of view.
In 1937, the demonstration school and city school of Huntsville combined and the building became the city junior high school. This merging was encouraged by the trend that "student teaching should be done in a realistic situation - that is, under conditions which prevail in the publics schools in which students would later teach [1]."
Architecturally, the Education Building appears reminiscent of the Administration Building and Women's Gym: it was a bulky box-looking structure similar to the former and built of cream-colored bricks like the later. It also seems to have been known by numerous names over its six decades: the Education Building, the PPC (for the Psychology, Philosophy & Counseling courses offered in later years), and later renamed in honor of Joseph Baldwin. Whatever name it went by didn't matter because the early 1980s brought a new look to the quadrangle with the demolition of the Education Building, Industrial Arts Building, and Women's Gym and the destruction of the Main Building.
Today education classes can be found in the Teacher Education Center, built in 1976 on the eastern edge of campus, continuing the tradition of teaching in Huntsville and east Texas.
