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What kind of explanation does history promote? Does history give us an advantage in dealing with current as well as bygone problems? These two different questions assume very similar burdens when historians defend the “usefulness” of their writing and research. The demand that history be “useful” impinges especially hard on the profession today in the areas of educational and black history. The reasons are, or should be, obvious. What is less obvious at the moment is which of the many meanings of “useful” do historians find most compelling. In the past, the professional and educational role of the historian has been largely affected by the questions he poses to deal with in the “usefulness” of his discipline.
In March 1711, Cotton Mather declared that, “A lively Discourse about the Benefit and Importance of Education, should be given to the Countrey.” “The Countrey,” he asserted, “is perishing for want of it; they are sinking apace into Barbarism and all Wickedness.” Mather was convinced that formal education was being neglected in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and for two centuries after Mather's death historians accepted his verdict. As early as 1835, Lemuel Shattuck described the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a “dark age” of learning. Later historians used similar phrases. By the close of the nineteenth century, Edward Eggleston wrote the epitaph for early eighteenth-century education, “a period of darkness and decline.”
The Rush of the Gentry into English schools and universities during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has been well documented. An Elizabethan writer, William Harrison, was merely reiterating a familiar complaint when he wrote of the universities that although they had originally been founded for poor men's sons “the rich do so incroch vpon them, and so farre hath this inconueience spread it selfe that it is in my time an hard matter for a poore mans child to come by a felowship (though he be neuer so good a scholer & woorthie of that roome.)”
The study of professions and professionalization has received great impetus in recent years, particularly in English-speaking countries, but generally overlooked is the importance that universities have always had in determining which groups came to be recognized as professions. In fact institutionalization of training within the university seems to have been the key to professionalization from the very beginning of the modern concept, and those areas which first were regarded as “graduate” subjects (medicine, divinity, and law) early came to be looked upon as professions.