A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

Improving the Condition of the Poor, housing inspection, vacation
schools, public baths and vacant lot farming begun by the Association
and continued by the city.

CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK

The historical perspective which shows social work to have developed
out of charity shows also that there is a close relation between that
development and contemporaneous developments in other lines. We know
that in every field of production, trade and business, enterprising
men have lately developed practical sciences to replace the old rules
of thumb, and that even in such a field as teaching there has lately
appeared a derived science of pedagogy which levies on psychology and
other direct sciences for its material. The stewards of charity, like
other people, saw the light of science full on their path. The result
was a new hope. Again and again in statements like the following we
have been told that the grosser disabilities which charity relieved
could be done away with for good if we would systematically search
out and treat their causes. “Poverty, vice and crime are no more
impossible to stamp out from human society than small-pox and measles.
To do the one requires the same intelligence on the part of man,
though perhaps in a higher degree, that the other does. The social
sciences and arts should have the same expansion as all the other
sciences and arts combined in that the relations of men to each other
are equally important if not more important than the relations of
man to nature.”[18] Or again, “The most formidable obstacle to the
adoption of the policy of prevention and treatment is not resistance
to the necessary public expenditure, still less inability to raise the
money, but the lack of administrative science and the shortcomings of
our administrative machinery. Merely to relieve destitution has been
nearly as easy as to do nothing. But successfully to intervene in order
to prevent--whether to prevent sickness, to prevent the neglect of
children, to prevent the multiplication of the mentally unfit, or to
prevent unemployment--involves the discovery of causes, the formation
of large schemes of policy, the purposeful planning of collective
action in modifying the environment of the poorer classes, together
with scientifically diversified treatment of those individuals who fall
below the recognized standards of civilized life.”[19]
When charity had thus accepted the necessity of using scientific
methods there ensued immediate and far-reaching results. Chief of
these have been the three developments which transformed charity into
social work. It is possible to trace them in performance and to trace
a parallel development of philosophy in the literature of the subject.
These developments can be simply indicated as (1) a systematization of
service; (2) an interest in causes of disaster, and (3) an extension of