This article explores how the idea of teachers as agents of change is historically constructed through the institutionalisation, secularisation, and normalisation process of professional teacher knowledges. Authors comparatively examine eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy literary sources and nineteenth-century US documents on the formation and expansion of public elementary teacher education institutions. The analysis highlights two points. First, the focus of teacher training was changed from the religious tradition to secularised practices by adopting modern science in teacher education; second, the construction of professional teacher knowledges in the form of "teaching methods" made it possible for the teacher to be a social agent. Despite the differences in time and place, teacher education institutions during the nation-building periods commonly adopted and used modern science for teacher training, emphasising sensory knowledge and empiricism as alternative means of professional development. Highlighting the training of teachers through modern science and methodical practices as a normalising process to make the "ideal(ised)" teacher, this study shows how teachers were constituted as a profession for the nation, whose salvific agential roles still remained in the scientific forms of teaching methods and secularised notions of teacher agency.