Introduction

Histories of education usually assume that the extension of educational opportunity is a good thing. Consequently, they rarely spend much attention assessing its opportunity costs or regretting what it may have replaced. Not unreasonably, they assume that the alternatives were probably unpleasant: ignorance, unfulfilled promise, dead-end manual labour, and a less attractive way of life. The history of education therefore has an in-built, Whiggish disposition. Elitists and obscurantists may block the advance of schools, but light eventually triumphs over darkness. In the history of primary and secondary education, this Whiggishness may do no great harm. In the history of professional education, however, we must be more cautious, for professional schools often displaced or discredited alternative practice-based forms of professional education. There are, therefore, opportunity costs and another side of its history, the side of the losers, of the viable, traditional institutions directly under the control of practising professionals. Like all losers’ history, it remains largely unwritten.

Of course, practitioner-controlled professional education has not been entirely displaced. As internship, it remains an integral part of medical education, and in other professions, under other names, it remains significant. Indeed, if we were somehow to add to it all the spontaneous and casual transmission of professional knowledge and skills ‘on the job’, it might still be the most common form of professional education. Nevertheless, over the long run, these practitioner-controlled forms of education have been overshadowed and displaced by school-based professional education. They are adjuncts and supplements to formal training rather than alternatives to it. The role of pupil, clerk, or probationer has a somewhat indeterminate, uncertain status compared with the universally acceptable role of student.