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.)”

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 early educational efforts of Massachusetts in establishing the publicly supported school are a well-known chapter in the history of American education. Not so well known are the missionary attempts carried on by the Puritan clergy to educate the Indians inhabiting the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One such effort was begun by John Eliot in 1646. Eliot had no narrow vision of quickly converting his copper-colored brethren, when in October 1646, he applied at the entrance to the wigwam of the Indian Waauban. Yet, even he did not envision the huge program which resulted in founding 14 Indian villages, complete with their own unique form of government and educational system. In effect, these villages became centers of adult education, making the Indians as much like their Puritan neighbors as was possible.

Paul Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education is now well over 50 years old, and no work of comparable scope exists at the present time in English. Although periodic requests have been made for a new encyclopedia of education in English, it is unlikely that Paul Monroe's Cyclopedia will ever be truly supplanted or its continuing value diminished. The importance of the Cyclopedia lies not only in its unchallenged comprehensiveness and scope, but preeminently in the unique contribution it made at a point in time of critical importance in the history of American education.

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.