THE TESTIMONY OF THE CONFERENCE
We have now propounded a tentative definition of social work based upon
an interpretation of its development and present practices. We will not
be sure of the correctness of that interpretation until we have tested
the applicability of the result to the whole range of social work. Nor
can we do this fairly by making our own presentation of social work.
For such a test we must find some ready-made presentation which will
marshal social work in all its diversity. The reports of the national
conference do this and, indirectly, the courses offered by the school
for training social workers. This chapter will test and, if possible,
expand the definition by the testimony of the conference and the
succeeding chapter by the testimony of the schools.
The conference is divided into ten sections:
1. Children.
2. Delinquents.
3. Health.
4. Public agencies and institutions.
5. The family.
6. Industrial and economic problems.
7. The local community.
8. Mental hygiene.
9. Organization of social forces.
10. Uniting of native and foreign-born.
At the annual convention each of these ten sections holds its own group
meetings at which papers are presented and discussions conducted on the
subjects appropriate to the section. It will be seen that the division
into sections is on a basis of administrative fields rather than
technique or function. The fields however are not mutually exclusive
but overlapping. Children although giving their name to the whole first
section appear among “delinquents” in the second, candidates for health
in the third and so on. Indeed, all of the ten section names might
serve as subheads under most or all of the other topics.
More significant in the search for a definition is the fact that
these several fields are not exclusively possessed by social workers.
“Children” are also the special concern of elementary teachers,
“delinquency” is primarily referred to the courts, “health” is the
conceded bailiwick of the medical profession and so forth. Even at
the conference many papers are presented by persons other than social
workers.[32]
These two types of overlapping make the masses of material with which
we have to deal both indeterminate and confusing. But representing as
they do the mutual interpenetration of social work and other callings,
they give a fresh opportunity to distinguish the nature of social
work. We may inquire what is the special interest of social work in
“children,” in “delinquents,” in “health,” and in what ways does it
differ from the respective interests of teaching, law, medicine and so
forth.
It is obviously impossible to review in readable compass the fifty
years in which the conference has met and, as there have been great
changes in social work during that time, it would be profitless for
a contemporary definition. A new arrangement of sections was made in
1918, and therefore the reports of the years 1918, 1919, and 1920
(the last in print when this study was made) were chosen for detailed
analysis.
That analysis can be most simply presented to the reader by sections,
putting before him an itemized statement of the subjects covered in
the reports of each section (treating the three years as a unit)
and then following this sectional review with such considerations
as have recommended themselves cumulatively and can only be offered
on the basis of the material as a whole. We are looking for the
characteristics of social work as a whole and can therefore consider
only such features as continue to show themselves throughout the
sections. In the following itemized lists for each section the figures
represent the number of papers in which the subject indicated was the
principle topic.
I. CHILDREN.
The forty-five papers presented in this section dealt with the
following subjects:
Plans for removing the handicaps of the illegitimate without
increasing illegitimacy 8
Recreational needs of children 7
General protective schemes, plans for extending a sheltering
arm over children isolated in the country and for
establishing state-wide vigilance 5
Standards for child care 4
Reports on the practices of particular localities 4
The working of children’s courts 4
Nature and causes of that chronic and excessive
troublesomeness which is called juvenile delinquency 3
Special psychology of children 3
Best ways of providing for children dependent on the public 2
The responsibilities of the public to its neglected children 2
Problems of day nurseries 2
Health needs of children 1
It requires but a glance at the above list to see how much wider is
its range than that of a teachers’ or medical men’s convention. There
is nothing to connect the topics--except children. This synthesis of
social work in personality which has been already indicated as the
“social” element in social work becomes increasingly evident in any
review of the conference. As it has proved difficult of definition it
will be well to keep it in mind in order that it may take shape during
the following review:
II. DELINQUENTS AND CORRECTION.
Probation and parole 4
Protective work for young people 4
Special value of policewomen in protective work for girls 2
Juvenile delinquency 2
Runaway and neglected girls 1
Papers not devoted to a single subject 17
Including such considerations as the influence of war
on criminality, municipal detention for women, the function
of a truancy officer, the desirability of creating a public
defender and the moral education of training school
inmates.
III. HEALTH.
Standard of living 19
Coordination of health services 5
Special problems of health in war time 4
Housing 3
Health work among the foreign-born 3
Health problems of the Red Cross 2
IV. PUBLIC AGENCIES AND INSTITUTIONS.
Administrative questions 15
Effects of prohibition 3
State pensions for mothers 3
Pauperism 2
Control of leprosy, by colonization or otherwise 2
Such standardization of record keeping as to make the
records kept by the several states comparable 2
Education of the public in their responsibility to public
charges, public care for negroes, care of crippled
children, care of defectives and delinquents--one paper
each 4
V. THE FAMILY.
Questions of administration 1
Registration of all appeals in a social workers’ exchange 3
Advantages of an orderly approach to social case analysis 3
Examples of case work treatment 3
The family 2
Marriage laws 2
Tasks growing out of war 10
Maintenance of family solidarity during absence of
men, reinstatement of returned soldiers, Red Cross
programs and functions of “home service.”
Papers not devoted to a single topic included such subjects as:
Case work as a source of information for sociology.
Case work as contributing to democracy.
Case work as interpreting industrial problems.
Case work as serving those above the poverty line,
cooperating, interpreting social work to the public,
organizing the community, family budgets, thrift and
pensions for widowed mothers.
VI. INDUSTRIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.
Cooperation, health insurance, British labor party program,
minimum wage, soldiers’ and sailors’ insurance, state care of
mothers and infants, inheritance, land monopoly, the position
of the negro in industry, trade unions in the public service,
social work and the revolution demanded by radicals, causes
for the existence of the I. W. W. and economic justice.
VII. THE LOCAL COMMUNITY.
Special needs of rural communities 11
Recreational facilities of all grades 6
Americanization on a neighborhood basis 3
Effects of war on a neighborhood 1
Other papers not easily classified deal with various expedients
for focussing local interest, settlements, the community store
and community kitchen, the social unit plan, enlistment of the
business men’s interest in community progress and councils of
national defence.
VIII. MENTAL HYGIENE.
State departments or societies and other organized agencies
for mental hygiene 8
Training of social workers for the new task 4
Experience of the war in the care of neuroses 3
Care for the feeble-minded 3
Mental hygiene in industry 3
Mental hygiene and delinquency 2
Mental hygiene and education 1
One paper each on--
Stimulation of public interest in care for the insane, the
psychiatric element in all case work, the individual versus
the family as the unit of social work, social problems as
the reaction of mental types, the court’s dealings with the
mentally afflicted, and the relation of social work to the
state’s program, to hospitals, physicians, and the community
in fostering mental hygiene. A few other papers present
the actual lore of the new subject.
IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL FORCES.
Publicity for social work activities and education of
the community in appreciating them 6
Impetus of the war to large scale organization for common
purposes and the desirability of integrating social
service 6
“War chest” 3
Registration of cases 3
Other papers treat of--
Endorsement and standardization of social work agencies,
salary standards for social workers and their labor
turnover and teaching materials for learners.
X. 1918--GENERAL PROBLEMS OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION.
Ten papers no different in import from those in other
sections which have been cited as discussing conditions
created by the war.
1919 and 1920--UNITING OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN IN AMERICA.
State immigrant commission, labor organizations and public
education as Americanizers, the foreign language worker
and foreign language press, foreign organizations and
family welfare, democracy and immigration, neighborhood
life, and the treatment of immigrant heritages.
Such, in briefest possible outline is the scope of the annual
conference on social work. What have its papers contributed to the
correction or expansion of a definition?
The first proposition of the tentative definition was that all forms of
social work originated in a spontaneous effort to extend benefits. How
is this affected by the testimony of the conference? In the first place
it is abundantly confirmed. The conference papers deal pre-eminently
with pioneering in the extension of benefits and opportunities. The
phraseology does not always suggest this but one has only to look
beyond the phraseology to the action in order to find it. If we look
at the first section we see it to be in effect proposing that the
whole community shall deliberately and without delay rearrange not
only schools and home life but industry and general living conditions
so as to give to all its children opportunity and encouragement such
as are now given only to the most fortunate. We find it advocating a
scheme of child welfare on a county basis which shall seek out “all
children in need of care for any reason” and demanding enforcement of
proper health precautions for the children of unenlightened parents
and a real chance in life for the illegitimate child. Among the titles
of this one section at one conference appear “Progress Toward Better
Laws,” “Planks in a 1920 Platform,” “Lessons from North Carolina,”
“A Community Program, etc.”[33] But these platforms and programs
are not to be ascribed to the community in any sense except that of
being proposed for the community as a whole by social workers. At the
same conference they are discussing “Social Workers as Interpreters”
of social conditions and methods of getting “publicity” for their
aims.[34] The same sort of title takes up the tale in the next section,
a “Program” again, “Aims and Methods” twice, “A Plan,” and so on
throughout the conference. Although other professions, education and
medicine for example, are constantly busy jacking up standards, their
general undertakings are fully accepted. For all regular purveyances
of education and medicine the community has given a blanket order and
expects to pay “within reason.” Social work is in a different case
for it is constantly trying to put over something which is still but
tentatively and experimentally accepted and depends root and branch on
the willingness of some people to do, out of hand, for others.[35]
The president of the conference in 1920 referred to a “belief in human
improvableness and a willingness to tackle the job.”[36] That is as far
as the conference usually philosophises in this direction. And this
is the sort of phraseology that makes one forget that social work is
extending benefits--this casual reference to tackling the job. It is
another of the paradoxes in the development of social work (we have
already noted science rescuing personality), that when charity offered
only a minimum of rough food, uniform raiment and herded shelter to the
utterly destitute there was much made of the generosity of the donor,
but now when social work has been carried to a point where it often
provides for the handicapped a great deal better than the rank and file
manage to provide for themselves it is taken to be a case of noblesse
oblige.
We may read in the “Observations of a Philanthropist” penned a century
ago that “It’s greatly for the interests of charity that the objects of
it should be respectful and grateful. We think our kindness in a manner
repaid when it is thankfully received; it’s a pleasure then to have
done it and an incitement to do more,”[37] or in a “hospital” report
that “the number of proper objects are amply sufficient to employ the
bounty of the rich.”[38]
The difference here indicated is not accounted for by the fact that
these were the observations of philanthropists while the conference is
composed of professional social workers for whom benefaction is all in
the day’s work. As has been already indicated, the papers read at the
conference are not all by social workers. Furthermore, the “incitement”
now employed to get from all manner of men financial support for the
undertakings of social work is of a very different order. Let any
one consider the appeals which come to his desk. They contain little
to rouse his vanity and the offer of an opportunity to acquire merit
is almost as uncommon. The degree of need and the certainty of
accomplishment are the things never omitted.
This suggests the cause for change. A century ago need might equally
well have been urged, but what could then have been promised of
accomplishment? All that was then expected was surcease of the
hour’s suffering. That is a fit subject of congratulation as when
a complaisant philanthropist wrote of the London of his time there
“is not a disease that can afflict human nature nor a want which the
varying conditions of man can require but finds an open asylum, a
resort ready prepared with the needful accommodation for reception,
comfort, instruction and cure, and with the exception of a few cases
entirely free of expense.”[39]
But what is that compared with the great modern adventure of
eliminating poverty and holding disease at bay? Science has brought
to charity faith and hope in terrestrial terms. The historian who
unearthed the above statement remarks, “In theory, society consists of
a large number of charitable people; in fact the number of those who
can be properly so described is a small one. The few who are really
in earnest in their desire to alleviate distress even at the cost
of considerable expenditure of time and money, are surrounded by a
multitude of persons who are willing to assist but only provided they
can do so at no great inconvenience to themselves. This lower power of
sympathy passes gradually through the stages of languid interest to
complete indifference.”[40]
Modern social work is no longer dependent on the appeal to “sympathy”
alone. It has a wide range of interest and through its practical
application of the various social sciences it associates itself with
all our hopes of progress. Expectation not only to mitigate the effects
of calamity but to prevent its recurrence gives social work a claim on
public attention which charity never had.
Along with this change in expectation goes naturally a change in
attitude toward the beneficiaries of social work. “There can be no
line of cleavage in the advancement of public sentiment between
the development of the general social agencies such as church and
school and the more intensive forms which we have come to know as
social work.”[41] The old view of society saw many staunch persons
standing on their own feet and a few weak brethren or victimized who
needed support. But the view implied in this quotation recognizes an
interdependence among all the members of society, an interdependence of
which the particular predicament of those who happen to be in need of
social work is merely an incident.
But the speakers at the conference go still further. “So long as there
are human frailties there will be need of social workers. But let us
not forget that the larger vision of social work contemplates not
charity alone but justice, and all social ills arising from environment
are man-made and therefore changeable.”[42] If the beneficiaries of
social work are thus counted scapegoats for us all, being victims of
social injustice, then every act of prevention (and we have said that
all social work is now at some remove preventive) is for the general
safety and no more than a proper self-defence. Social work now resents
the smugness that can represent as especially disinterested any service
to those who have been paying the penalty of blunders or iniquities for
which the prosperous may be equally responsible. It is only justice to
them or less and it is sound policy for all. No wonder social work will
not stand to be considered charity! It considers its preoccupation with
the backwaters of race progress to show no gracious condescension on
its part--merely an appreciation of the extent and importance of the
backwaters.
But all this shows social work more than ever spontaneous and
gratuitous, for it does not work for even a heavenly reward; and it
must, unadmonished, stir the community to support the work it sets
itself to perform. It is only the old condescension that has gone. The
extension of benefits remains, but has become something constructive
and collectivistic.
Such a change in attitude toward benefaction would necessarily
affect the second criterion of social work proposed in our tentative
definition--its incidence in response to need. What is the testimony of
the conference on this second criterion? The analysis of subjects dealt
with in the first section reads “plans for removing _handicaps_,”
“recreational _needs_,” “_protective_ schemes,” “standards for child
_care_,” “nature and causes of _delinquency_,” “providing for
children _dependent_ on the public,” “responsibilities to _neglected_
children,” “health _needs_.” Two subjects, which as given, do not
commit themselves on the question of need complete the list. In the
second section the persons under consideration are by definition
subject to some sort of provision and control. They are delinquents.
But that the interest of the social workers is especially in fostering
and guarding them is shown by the fact that young people’s need of
protection is the subject of six papers, juvenile delinquency of
two, runaway and neglected girls of one more, while the rest deal
with adjustment of treatment to the needs of older offenders, with
probation, parole, education and the form of detention desirable in a
given case. The third section deals entirely with standards of living
in relation to disease conditions, and with means of extending medical
service. The remaining seven sections continue to show need as the
occasion of social work, but it is a sublimated sort of need which
would be much misrepresented by any classification of the beneficiaries
as “needy.” The whole level of interest has passed above and beyond
that.
As has been already indicated discussion turns on “programs,” “plans,”
“standards,” and it is in a positive and anticipatory vein as by
people embarked on a constructive undertaking. The note of initial
accomplishment is most clearly struck in the “local community”
division with such titles as “The Boy Scout and Community Building,”
“Organization of Games and Athletics in Rural Communities,” “Signs
of Rural Hope,” etc. But turn to the context and you will read, “The
Scout program recognizes the need of the boy for a recreational program
for his unused time which at the same time is educational. Scouting
also recognizes the need that the man has, etc.”[43] The neglected
rural situation, the poverty of interest in some neighborhoods--these
are what have drawn social work to undertakings that carry no hint of
remedy in the expression given their objects.
In a dynamically conceived society it is hard to say where remedy
shades into prevention and prevention into construction. Prevention
of disaster not only involves the maintenance of continuously good
conditions but the anticipation of wants. If we are not to have
juvenile delinquency boys must have some chance for wholesome
recreation. If we would avoid bad housing we must arrange betimes a
good city plan preserving open spaces where they will be wanted later
and developing each type of building in a neighborhood where it need
not be soon perverted to a use for which it was not intended and will
not be well adapted.
Dr. Simon Patten contended that the present productivity of the world
was such as to free mankind from any fear of general dearth and cause
all our prospects to be potentially in terms of abundance and not of
want, to rescue us from the old “pain economy” of insufficiency and
give us a “pleasure economy” on a safe margin of sufficiency. Under
these circumstances, he said, “world riches may replace the living
sacrifice and become the social contrivance that lowers human costs
and we must cease to think that the anguish of the sentient creature
is compensated by the development of moral qualities which merely
reconcile man to repeating the experience of suffering.”[44] Social
work has already ceased to think in that fashion and is working in
the spirit of a pleasure economy so that the terminology of need is
no longer pre-eminent. “There are times when self-sacrificing zeal is
demanded and all honor to those who then devote or lose themselves in
service. That is only one side of it. The need of sacrifice is always a
reflection on the men or circumstances calling for it.”[45] That is the
view of modern social work, the frame of mind in which it sets about
its work. It talks about what has to be done as a matter of course and
is chiefly concerned with the best way of doing it. It is beginning
to outgrow “sob stories” even in asking support from an indifferent
public--they set too low a standard of toleration and there are some
modern social workers who turn from them abashed, as from dallying with
an outrage beneath endurance. The battle ground of reform must be on
another plain where the initiated see danger but the complaisant still
need convincing.
“When once the worst is gone the second best becomes intolerable.”
Gray, the historian of English philanthropy, describes the effective
philanthropist as the ideal agitator, “It is his to discover
those larger ends of common welfare which reach beyond the moral
perceptiveness of ordinary men in their ordinary moods. He is, as it
were, an explorer in the unmapped world of the ideal life from whence
he brings back news of an unreached good, such tidings as sound like
travelers’ tales in our ears, but which haunt the mind of men until
they seek to verify the story by a practical policy calculated to
transform the actual. Only it must be observed that the most daring
speculator cannot move very far from his base and the wildest Utopia is
determined by the conditions of its year of publication.”[46]
“I hold,” said Dr. Southard to the 1919 conference, “whatever
the ideal order, the practical order of work called social work
begins with the eradication of evil. It may sound better to sow
goodness or to transplant goodness, or even to graft goodness in
the eager social world, and beautiful little gardens of Eden or
smaller cases of goodness can be shown here and there to the social
visitor--nevertheless, I hold, with the prejudice of a physician
perhaps, the eradications of evil are more in the first order of our
work than disseminations, transplantations, and grafts of goodness.
At any rate, if there be anything at all in the millennial hopes and
ingrained optimisms of Spencerian evolution, it is plain that by and
large we are putting evil behind us and arriving at goodness by a
clever technique of successful destruction.”[47] This “eradication of
evil” may, as one side of the “technique” of evolution, operate in the
terms of any developing organization; but in terms of eradication of
evil, not in its own functioning or its subject, but in the conditions
of its object it is not common outside of social work. It is not to be
found in the business world where all purveyance shuns the applicant
most in need of its wares and seeks the one best able to pay. It is
not to be found in the law, which tries to hold the scales even to all
comers. It is only slightly and intermittently in state-craft which
while it is coming more and more to inhibit abuse of the helpless
does still, from an age-old sense of security in the alliance with
wealth and power, bend its constructive energies to encouragement of
the prosperous. It is not even in education, which constantly tends
to provide in each school grade teaching suitable for those who will
have longest to study and is only importuned by demands from _outside_
to cater in the lower grades to those who must get in them all the
education they are ever to have. Social work stands alone in its
purely personal championship of the less secure in prosperity. It is in
its enormous demands for them that it seems to have turned to purely
constructive things.
It is indeed possible that along the lines of prevention social work is
developing a function which is positive in the same sense as hygiene is
positive in the field of medicine and that social work will, to that
extent, independently “plant good” as well as “eradicate evil.” But it
is also possible, and in the light of past developments more probable,
that any constructive phase of social work which proves permanent
should come to be looked on as a routine purveyance and no longer
considered social work. This we have already seen to have happened in
the case of free education and many other things.
The conference has thus confirmed and filled out the elementary
features of social work which it inherits from charity, voluntary
benefaction and response to need. What does it have to say of the
qualifying features that have transformed charity into social work--the
emergence of the individual as the only and sufficient nexus for its
services and the adoption of scientific guidance?
The first of these has already been touched on in relation to the
first section. Throughout the second the discussion all bears on the
prevention of delinquency or the care of delinquents. There is not
much discussion of pure justice, the burden of the argument is all
that we should “approach every individual prisoner with conscientious
determination to give him the best service of which we are capable,
realizing that his future is largely in our hands.”[48] A public
defender is asked for “in order that every person accused, no matter
how poor, may have a full and fair trial.”[49] And for sentenced
prisoners social work asks something more than mere detention, “we
used to look upon them, in the stage of repression, en masse. * *
* Instead of committing a man to a particular institution he is now
committed to the custody of a board of control * * * to be examined *
* * to determine just where he will fit into school or industry. The
man will be assigned by his board, to the particular prison to which he
is best suited for mental and physical treatment.”[50] “If a child who
is mentally sound comes into court with a mind bent on the commission
of some offence he should be sent to a special school having for its
purpose the education of such children. Let the great departments
of psychology and sociology of our colleges and universities devise
a course of instruction and education that will reclaim a juvenile
delinquent who is mentally and physically sound”[51] and “we should
extend the methods developed in the Children’s Courts to apply to all
ages, wiping out our arbitrary age line by improving the treatment of
the older groups.”[52]
It is in this section that there appears at its plainest the paradox
that the questions purely dependent on what we call personality are
questions of social relationship and all genuinely social questions are
questions of personal life. A public policy is justified in terms of
personal benefit but interest is claimed for personal difficulties on
the ground that they illuminate public issues.
The third division is one that speaks quite unequivocally concerning
the nature of social work, for there is an old and kindly profession
already established in this field and social work must justify its
own entrance there. All of the subjects in this health section are of
interest to the doctor as well as the social worker, but for the doctor
they throw light on the causes and cures of disease, for the social
worker they are a point of departure for active work to establish
better standards of living. Nineteen of the papers presented deal
specifically with that subject. Five more deal with the co-ordination
of various health agencies--a task in social engineering. One speaker,
himself a physician, reports no less than ten agencies united in
efforts to improve a city’s health. Only four of these (the board
of health, the hospital, the tuberculosis society and the medical
profession) were permanently concerned with health. The other six,
the schools, the park department, the city statistics department, the
industries, insurance companies and churches were enlisted, as the
context shows, as so many agents establishing connections with the
individual beneficiaries of the campaign. The work of choosing them
and enlisting their co-operation demanded a knowledge of social not of
physiological conditions.
In the next section, that devoted to public agencies and institutions,
the conspicuous fact is that social work does not forget that public
care is for private people. It hardly seems necessary to quote
from all the sections even in pursuit of this most elusive of the
characteristics of social work. One more citation will be enough.
“We social workers have our contribution to make to that ultimate
attainment of democracy which must be wrought out, not in uniformity
but in diversity, not only in the right of man to individual freedom
but in his ability to enter into that right.”[53]
The extension of the sense of public responsibility, the realization
that reform must come in all the interlocking activities of a highly
organized business, political and social life has tempted some people
to think that the days of social work are numbered or to seek out for
it some highly specialized or recondite function. But if we are right
in ascribing to it this function of challenging all forms of service
to reach and satisfy individual needs it may be more important in the
future than in the past. Wholesale and collectivist methods call for
constant adaptation of general means to particular cases and the more
we give of government service the more we may need of social work.
The more varied our health service, the more flexible and extensible
our educational opportunities, the more occasions there will be for
adjustment. Such follow-up work as is done by hospitals and by the
workmen’s compensation office, the work of the mothers’ assistance
fund, of the voluntary experiments in special nutrition classes,
vocational guidance, and scholarships for trade school attendance, are
only a few examples of the kind of thing social work branches into as
established agencies extend their own responsibilities.
The fact that social work rescues people who fall through the meshes
of the school system, people dismissed from clinical treatment only to
return to a regimen bound to revive their troubles, that it discovers
the round pegs in square holes and the neglected groups and anomalous
cases has caused other people to see it as all converging in a liaison
work which shall ultimately be all there is left for it to perform
and which shall be in essence social case work. From what has already
been said it will be evident that there is no reason to think that
social work which has been so prolific of criticism of our established
institutions and a pioneer in experiment should cease to exercise this
function, which is as infinite in possibilities as the life of man
itself, or even that it will cease to work along lines of inquiry or
of group work. That little word “social” opens up the possibilities
of all the permutations and combinations in human consciousness. The
conference at least hints that social work knows it.
And what of the method by which social work is to be conducted. Is it,
as the tentative definition said, suggested by the social sciences?
There is not a great deal of explicit reference to social science,
but the concepts of economics, social psychology and sociology are
constantly in evidence and even political science has its say in an
“engineering” conception of the state, in definitions of democracy
and in criteria of progress. The almost complete disappearance of
the question of relative responsibility of the individual and society
which morality and philosophy have debated in so many forms testifies
to assimilation of the sociological concept of social life as an
integration of individual lives rather than an aggregation and of the
individual life as no digit but an incident “* * * time moves swiftly
in the social field and the special knowledge of today easily becomes
the common knowledge of tomorrow.”[54] And after all that has been said
in the preceding pages of the obvious effects of a scientific method
and scientific attitude in making social work what the conference shows
it to be it scarcely remains to prove or even argue the confirmation,
the reinforcement, the expansion of the last qualification of social
work.
Nine round-table conferences and five committee reports, in addition
to the papers presenting concrete programs and reports of local
experiments testify to the careful checking up of method. The constant
references to programs, standards and experience, to records and
the search for causes, the emphasis on prevention and the patient,
objective, therapeutic attitude of the social worker all testify to the
conquest of the field by science. But the completeness and significance
of that conquest are plainest in the ever-present, implicit but
unmistakable assumption that all the undertakings discussed are
parts of a systematically coordinated campaign based upon continuing
observation of cause and effect.
Thus have the reports of the conference confirmed and filled out the
tentative definition. But the analysis did not cull from them any
fresh characteristics of social work. Their mass of commentary, aimed,
as it seemed, in all possible directions, would suggest no testimony
except in answer to leading questions and we will have to be satisfied
with such expansion of the definition as, while adding no new terms,
commits the already proposed items to more significant implications.
The definition so expanded must be passed on, for challenge or
alteration by the evidence of the training schools.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] The 1920 conference heard from four judges (three of them of
juvenile courts), three college professors and one college president,
a bishop, a rabbi, a governor, and a state commander of the American
Legion, as well as from doctors and other professional people who
occupied positions ranking as social work.
[33] Conference, 1919, pp. 111, 123, 133, 136.
[34] Ibid. 1920, pp. 271 and 278.
[35] Ibid. pp. 188, 111, 129, 135 and 298.
[36] Ibid. p. 4.
[37] History of English Philanthropy, p. 269.
[38] Ibid., p. 273.
[39] Ibid., p. 271, referring to the opening of the 18th century.
[40] Ibid., p. 266.
[41] Conference, 1920, p. 74.
[42] Ibid., p. 77.
[43] Ibid., p. 267.
[44] The New Basis of Civilization, p. 55.
[45] Philanthropy and the State, p. 235.
[46] Ibid., p. 302.
[47] Conference, 1919, p. 583.
[48] Ibid., 1918, p. 147.
[49] Ibid., p. 171.
[50] Ibid., 1919, p. 100.
[51] Ibid., 1918, p. 126.
[52] Ibid., p. 136.
[53] Conference, 1918, p. 287.
[54] R. W. Kelso, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 1.