CHAPTER V

There are some fifteen schools for the training of social workers,[55]independent institutions or university departments. The younger among them have not followed at all closely the organization or practices of the older[56]and all work in close co-operation with local social work agencies, farming their students out with these for practice work and drawing lecturers from the agency staffs. The varied curricula of the schools seem therefore to offer direct evidence of what is considered in their respective regions, the most necessary equipment for social workers.

Only three school catalogues venture any characterization of the tasks for which their courses equip. Toronto gives the most inclusive. “The sense of social obligation and interdependence has grown greater as our social life has grown more complex. The more social conditions have been studied, the more apparent has it become that many of our worst evils are due to the lack of the science which should direct and stimulate the sense of our solidarity. In recent years governments, municipal and other authorities, industrial corporations and voluntary associations of all kinds have been compelled to make ever-extending provisions for industrial protection, social insurance, public health service, housing improvement, recreation and various other forms of organized social effort. All these activities have created the sphere of a new profession, that of the trained social worker.” Here are the familiar “senseof social obligation,” the reference to a “science which should direct and stimulate this sense,” the “ever-extendingprovisions” prompted by it and, unmentioned but obviously implicit, a constant concern with things subject to amelioration: “protection,” “insurance,” “service,” “improvement,” “recreation”—these are the substantives in its main statement. The Ohio catalogue itemizes the demands of social service on a training school[57]but the only generalization to be deduced from the list is that they all imply a purpose of rescue or amelioration. The Simmons characterization confines itself entirely to emphasizing the implications of the word “social”[58]and the Missouri school opens its catalogue with the discouraging statement that “it is impossible at the present time to construct a satisfactory definition of social work.”

This exhausts the slender sheaf of direct comment. For further enlightenment we must analyse the offered equipment itself. The nature of the training given will predict the nature of the work expected to follow. There are a great many courses offered and the variety not of nomenclature only but of apparent content is enough for bewilderment. Classification of the courses according to the type of preparation they seem to offer does however sort them into three main groups.

A. Courses which introduce the student to the social sciences and the methods and concepts on which these rest.B. Courses which offer information on the field of social work both past and present.C. Courses which equip specifically for certain social work tasks.

A. Courses which introduce the student to the social sciences and the methods and concepts on which these rest.

B. Courses which offer information on the field of social work both past and present.

C. Courses which equip specifically for certain social work tasks.

In the first group, that of courses introducing the student to the social sciences, their methods and concepts, fall sociology courses of various sorts, courses in (1) general sociology, (2) the history of institutions, (3) theories of social progress, (4) the value of norms of income and opportunity for a given level of civilization, (5) the means of “social control.” Here also belong courses in (6) general psychology, (7) social psychology, (8) statistics and (9) economics.

In the second group, that of courses offering information on the general field of social work, fall courses on (1) the nature and mutual relations of contemporary social work undertakings, (2) the history of philanthropy and (3) current social problems. Here ought also to be put (4) the courses offered by five schools in the causes of poverty, because poverty has been an age-long challenge to philanthropy and is still the proximate occasion for a great part of social work.

For the third group are left courses in about forty subjects pertaining to special fields or special methods. These subjects overlap and interchange material but yield to classification as preparatory for work in eight or nine fairly distinguishable fields.

A ninth field may be made of social case work, as when itappears under such titles as “family rehabilitation,” but it must also be recognized as a technique more or less utilized in six of the eight other fields. There remain a few other technical courses such as those in record keeping.

The schools, all but four,[59]arrange their courses in departments varying in number from two to ten. Altogether seventeen different fields are indicated by the several schools and under them are variously grouped the forty subjects taught.[60]These very involved curricula dealing, as they do, in such staggering propositions as the nature of progress and the causes of poverty, and seeming in their explicit statements unanimous in nothing which might serve the cause of definition do give certain collective testimony.

In the first place they are agreed that social work comprises a variety of separate callings demanding differential training. The differential training is not the result of specialization after receiving a common training. Most schools while requiring a certain amount of common background for all students recognize no general course and require every student to enroll in one or another department.

Secondly, in making a great deal of elective work interchangeable among the special courses and requiring certain prerequisites for all courses alike they all recognize a close relation between the various branches of social work.

Thirdly, they show that the work they prepare for is not “social” in the merely vague sense of having a public interest. It is social in the specific sense of dealing with people in their relations to other people. Its prerequisite is not physiology, the science of that part of man which can develop in isolation, but psychology, the science of intelligence which develops only in contact with other intelligences. We can see this in the contrast between thetraining given in a medical school and that given in a school for social workers. The former teaches a great deal about man’s physical make-up and its hazards but very little about his mental make-up: while the latter may teach enough of sanitary practice to understand a doctor’s directions, almost always teaches something of mental life and always a great deal about social settings and the available means of improving them. This “social” interest is constant throughout the schools. The courses in industry, for example, do not teach efficiency engineering or price fixing but personnel management and other matters presumably ministering directly to the well being of the workers. These schools do not equip for the advancement of any particular science. Philosophy and art of any sort enter them only as casual visitors. They teach in the name of no single creed and formulate no specific purpose. Despite their enormous array of topics their interest remains essentially personal.

Fourthly, the schools are more or less consciously training crusaders. The word “problem” is in frequent use. It is freely applied to difficulties not outstandingly problematical and its use in place of any harsher or less hopeful word indicates the notion of arming rescuers with a solution. The word “standard” with its implication of something attainable but not always attained, “prevention,” “service,” “welfare,” “relief,” “correction,” “treatment,” appear thickly scattered among the subject titles and one is surely justified in inferring that to make changes for the better is not to be for the social worker as for most men a rare bright spot in the routine of labor, but his very stock-in-trade and justification for existence.

Lastly, the requirement of a certain amount of study of the social sciences followed by methodical training in special lines, together with supervised practice work after the manner of a technical school, testifies to the important parts played in the preparation of social workers by both scientificmethod and the lore of the social sciences.

Beyond this it does not seem safe to generalise. These five conclusions about social work indicated by the school catalogues suggest that it is an alliance of distinct but closely related callings furthering “social” welfare in a quite specific sense. Secondly, they imply that the social worker is a rescuer and champion equipped for his tilt from the armory of the social sciences. Does not this come to about the same thing as is described in our tentative definition, a group of activities looked upon as so many phases of a single undertaking because they all attempt to extend benefits in response to a need; are all concerned with social relationships; and all avail themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.

The schools then, like the conference, confirm the tentative definition but do not expand it by the addition of any new terms. It is possible that social work as a whole has no more common features. But it is, of course, also possible that other features could be found if we had some fresh clue to them. The present study, having put all its leading questions must again content itself with adding to the already accepted terms of the definition such further implications as the curricula suggest—and again we find these implications to come from the use of science for philanthropic purposes.

The courses most commonly “required” for all students in the schools are those treating the social sciences. What do these offer to the incipient social worker? The courses in sociology—especially those which thirteen of the schools offer in the history of certain institutions or in race comparisons—give perspective. They show institutions changing in form and function. They show ideas of right changing as the institutions change, temporary institutions conditioning our lives even in the matters a layman supposes instinctive. They force a student to look outside the setting of custom and creed into which, like every otherman, he has been born. They show him the provincialism of sweeping judgments pronounced on the basis of sectional, sectarian or class standards. They teach him in a professional capacity (if in no other) to recognize varieties of good. Yet all the while they are making possible a simpler and more objectified conception of individuality than it is easy for the uninstructed to entertain. We look with something very like amusement on the animistic and anthropomorphic views of natural phenomena entertained by primitive men and yet we are only just beginning to realize that the subjective interpretations and moral judgments with which we have so long been satisfied in respect to humanity are equally arbitrary and deductive and that man also is, up to a certain point a natural phenomenon to be inductively considered. In such perspective praise and blame become to many issues irrelevant and we begin soberly to reckon the possibilities of education in the compass of individual lifetimes.

Psychology, after sociology the science most frequently taught in the schools, pushes further the process sociology began. It shows that our most intimate convictions are not axiomatic. It shows the thought that is our very selves to be half the creation of others, and makes the question of individual blameworthiness a merely practical one of what forces are to be reckoned with in a given situation.

The third of the general sciences taught is statistics, the language of collective fact. By discovering norms it shows danger lines. It tells what food and what air and what income are necessary to support life in an average individual and what degree of development is usual in a child of a given age and what degree of intelligence suffices to keep people out of trouble without the protection of a guardian. It gives the charitably inclined hard facts with which to face the indifferent and firm ground to stand on in demanding reform. At first sight it looks like a meansto intolerable regimentation but rightly used it is a charter of freedom. Given a knowledge of the margin of safety we can make a concerted attack on substandard conditions while allowing indefinite variation above the danger line and the mere nonconformist need not be dreaded or attacked for simple nonconformity.

Thus may courses in social science give to many a raw recruit of social work grounds for acting with the tolerance, the respect for individuals, the single and unaccusing eye on present and future possibilities which their elders and maybe betters had (when they had them at all) as the rare and not to be commanded gifts of sheer humanity and wisdom.

Here is the contribution of science to social work which touches its vital center, refines the very impulse that animates it, as it animated its predecessors and keeps it true to form among the distractions of technical formality. No study can produce imagination, sympathy, generosity or good taste any more than it can give a student a better brain, but what it can do is to give to persons of only average perspicacity and humanity the understanding to act with some degree of intelligence and consideration where the untrained average person would make cruel and disastrous blunders.

The tentative definition of social work which we sought to test and add to by the testimony of conference and school curricula has gained no fresh terms but it has gained in significance and, taken together with all its implications, makes of social work something thoroughly definitive and characteristic. But the definition was wanted for practical purposes and before dropping the subject it will be necessary to inquire whether it can in any degree serve them.

FOOTNOTES:[55]For a list of schools see the Appendix. The list comprises the membership of the “Association of Training Schools for Professional Social Workers,” organized 1919.[56]All information in this chapter is from the school catalogues for the years 1920-21 or 1921-22 (the latest available when this study was begun) or from correspondence with the schools.[57]Social service “calls for a knowledge of the principles of social organization, the conditions which cause poverty and may lead to dependency, the social and psychological factors involved in the training of youth, the methods of promoting thrift and independence among the laboring classes, the many experiments which have been made in the field of social legislation and the relations between these various theories and activities.”[58]“The purpose of the School of Social Work is to give professional training in the art of adjusting personal relations. Social workers also have to do with food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention, but these are incidental to their main work of adjusting differences which arise in the relations between people, e.g., between school authorities and parents and parents and pupils, between family and community.”[59]Four schools which are integral parts of universities with many of the courses their students are expected to take organized as parts of other departments are not divided as are the independently organized schools and those whose college connection is not so involved.[60]For list see Appendix II, C.

[55]For a list of schools see the Appendix. The list comprises the membership of the “Association of Training Schools for Professional Social Workers,” organized 1919.

[56]All information in this chapter is from the school catalogues for the years 1920-21 or 1921-22 (the latest available when this study was begun) or from correspondence with the schools.

[57]Social service “calls for a knowledge of the principles of social organization, the conditions which cause poverty and may lead to dependency, the social and psychological factors involved in the training of youth, the methods of promoting thrift and independence among the laboring classes, the many experiments which have been made in the field of social legislation and the relations between these various theories and activities.”

[58]“The purpose of the School of Social Work is to give professional training in the art of adjusting personal relations. Social workers also have to do with food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention, but these are incidental to their main work of adjusting differences which arise in the relations between people, e.g., between school authorities and parents and parents and pupils, between family and community.”

[59]Four schools which are integral parts of universities with many of the courses their students are expected to take organized as parts of other departments are not divided as are the independently organized schools and those whose college connection is not so involved.

[60]For list see Appendix II, C.

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