A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								



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