Composition historians have recently worked to recover histories of composition in normal schools. This essay argues, however, that historians schools in American education by inaccurately comparing rhetorical education in normal schools to rhetorical education in colleges and universities. Consequently, claims that normal schools set useful historical precedents for rhetoric and composition are misguided. In order to understand normal schools’ importance for contemporary teachers and scholars, composition historians need to account more precisely for larger institutional objectives— common objectives that constitute an institution type across individual cases—that shaped the conditions for rhetorical education