A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

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