THE TESTIMONY OF THE SCHOOLS
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 “sense of social obligation,” the reference to a “science
which should direct and stimulate this sense,” the “_ever-extending_
provisions” 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.
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.
1. Work in the interest of the public health, mental or physical.
2. Organization of community groups on various scales in both urban
and rural areas.
3. Work in connection with industry.
4. Work in the interest of children.
5. Work with people socially handicapped because of race or recent
immigration.
6. Work in connection with the enactment or administration of social
legislation.
7. Work with defectives.
8. Housing.
A ninth field may be made of social case work, as when it appears
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 the training
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 scientific method 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 other man, 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 means to 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.