The Social Science Foundations of Education for Social Work

The Social Science Foundations of Education for Social WorkAuthor(s): Harry M. CassidySource: Social Forces, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Mar., 1948), pp. 303-310Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2572054 .

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~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~4 i PUBLIC WELFARE AND SOCIAL WORK

Contributions to this Depsrtmcnt will include matcrial of three kindsi (i) original discussion, suggestion, plans, programs, and thc. ories; (X) reports of special projccts, working programs, confercnces and meetings, and progress in any distinctive aspect of ebc held; (3)

) special rcsults of study aud rcscarch.

THE SOCIAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL WORK*

HARRY M. CASSIDY

University of Toronto

There have been major developments in the theory and the practice of social work education since the beginning of the late wvar. The Amer- ican Association of Schools of Social Workt adopted in 1944 a new statement of principles on curriculum which defines far more clearly than before the essentials of professional training in the form of eight basic areas of study: public welfare, social case work, social group work, community organization, medical information, social research, psychiatric information, and social administration. A new doctrine of three levels of jobs and three levels of training (undergraduate, one-year graduate, and two-year graduate) has been clearly stated and widely accepted. There has been much concern with undergraduate preparation both for social work practice and for entrance to the graduate schools. This ferment of thinking and discussion has been reflected in important curricular changes within the graduate schools and in the development of numerous undergraduate preprofessional programs offering concentrations in the social sciences, with or without much content of social welfare.

This paper is to be concerned with the question of foundations for professional education in social work, and particularly with the social science portion of these foundations. With a new super- structure planned by the AASSW Curriculum Committee in 1944, which meets with substantial if not unanimous approval, we have new and

better premises for the reconsideration of foundations; the eagerness of many undergraduate colleges to play a part in education for social work has pressed us to think and to act; the demands of the field for more personnel call upon us to pause and reconsider our policies; and the general movement of curricular reform within the Liberal Arts college contributes its influence. For these and other reasons we in the schools of social work of the United States and Canada are looking to our foundations for professional education more carefully than ever before. But the question is complicated and difficult, and it abounds with awkward issues. May I try to sketch briefly the background of the problem, and then to outline what appear to be its essentials.

THE BACKGROUND

There has been general agreement that education in social work and education in the social sciences are closely related. The historical association between the two is apparent in the use of the term "social science" in the nineteenth century, both in Britain and in America, to describe what we now call social work. The early "social science associations" were agencies for the im- provement as well as the study of social conditions. The University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration has grown out of an early experi- ment in university extension work called the "Institute of Social Science." The University of Toronto school was called the "Department of Social Science" as recently as 1941. The English counterparts of our American schools

* A paper presented to the National Conference of Social Work, San Francisco, April 17, 1947.

t Hereafter referred to as AASSW.

303



304 SOCIA L FORCES

are still called departments or curricula of "social science" or of "social studies."

Many of our present schools have also had close associations, in the past if not now, with the recognized social science departments of their respective universities. All four of the West Coast schools which are now members of the AASSW (British Columbia, Washington, Cali- fornia, and Southern California) have grown out of social science departments. In the 1920's it was the economics and the sociology departments of the State universities across the continent which took the lead in developing training for social work, under University auspices, following the earlier beginnings of independent agency- sponsored schemes in Eastern cities. As in the English departments of social studies today, the curricula of these early programs consisted typically of a conmbination of courses in sociology, economics, psychology, and other social sciences, along with case work and some other social welfare subjects and field instruction. There was no question then about "social science foundations." The social sciences were right in the school curricula.

The presumption implicit in most, if not all, of the training programs of 25 or 30 years ago, that students should take to their professional work some familiarity with social science, has been confirmed in recent years by many authori- tative statements oni social work education, both from those representing school faculties and professional practice. Tlhe Association of Schools has repeatedly stated its conviction that the social sciences make an important contribution to the professional equipment of the social worker. The reasons for this conviction were clearly outlined in the Association's report, Education for the Public Social Services, published in 1942, in which it is argued that the "common training needs" of even the more junior workers in a wide range of public social services include "knowledge of the organization of social services and their place in the structure of government... ; an understanding of social, political, and economic forces in the community...; the understanding and use of the knowledge of behaviour; and the comprehension of and ability to utilize the principles of administration." The Wartime Committee on Personnel of the American Association of Social Workers urged in its important report of 1944 that "undergraduate or preprofessional

study (for social work should) include social sciences". Karl de Schweinitz, in recent memo- randa for the Social Security Board and the American Council on Education, has tried to analyse "the basis skill in social security administration" and concludes very strongly that a major element of this skill comes from broad exposure to the social sciences.

Thus there has been no lack of formal adherence to the doctrine that training in the social sciences, either concurrently with training in social work or prior to it, should constitute part of the preparation of the social worker. Hence a visitor from abroad might conclude, from a cursory review of the background of education for our profession and of the abundant formal statements on principles and objectives, that we had the problem of the social science contribution well in hand. But the developments of recent years and the facts of our current experience do not support this easy conclusion.

The difficulties which we face today derive in large measure from the emancipation of the schools (not including, of course, New York, Pennsylvania, Simmons, Chicago, and others which were independent from the outset) from sponsoring undergraduate departments and their transition, in the 1920's and the 1930's, to graduate professional schools. In 1934 the AASSW ruled that member institutions must progressively become graduate institutions, and by 1939 all had formally compiled with the requirements. This was a very important step forward and upward in quality of training. But it involved adjust- ments which had substantial, and in many cases unfortunate, effects upon the social science component in training.

The new status of the schools gave them greater freedom to develop curricula more closely related to practice, notably by adding case work courses and field work. Some social science subjects continued to be offered but were generally dropped or relegated to secondary positions as more distinctive social work subjects emerged to claim more of the time of students. In the basic minimum curriculum adopted by the Association in 1932, only one distinctively "social science" *course, on labour problems, was recommended; and in the new curriculum of 1944 none is specified. By now the demands of the purely professional curriculum upon the available time for a two-year master's degree program are such that there is



PUBLIC WELFARE AND SOCIAL WORK 305

virtually no space for studies in the more basic social sciences.' There is some compensation for this in the fact that a new "science of social welfare," itself one of the social sciences, has developed progressively as a special field of study for the faculties and the students of the professional schools.2 It is natural and proper that the energies of the small corps of faculty members, many of them recruited from the field of practice and some without much in the way of social science background, should have been devoted primarily to the tremendous pioneering task of building up the subject-matter of the new field in the limited time they could snatch from the business of instructing their students in the arts of practice. But along with the real advances in professional training which arose out of the transition of the schools to graduate status, there occurred also a break in the former close association of education in social work with social science and a material decline in the proportion (if not always the abso- lute amount) of social science study in the training of students.

UNDERGRADUATE PREPARATION

The way out of the apparent breach between precept and practice was obviously to ask students to obtain their basic social science training as undergraduates. This was the solution proposed by the AASSW, whose Curriculum Committee made a careful study of desirable prerequisite requirements in 1936 and presented a report which was adopted the following year. The report concludes that "economics, political science, psychology, and sociology (including social anthropology) be recognized as the preprofessional subjects most closely related to the social service curriculum; ... that while a student in a school of social work should know something about each of these sciences, it is probably advisable for him to take not less than twelve semester hours

or eighteen quarter hours in one of them while doing a less amount of work in others; that the Association is unwilling at this time to designate any one of these four subjects as in general more important than any other; that the Association recognizes the value to the student of courses in biology, history, and English literature and composition, and that the Association takes it for granted that the student will take considerable work in these subjects." The report also recommended that the schools "shouldi move toward the adoption of prerequisites, after the manner of medicine and law."

To some extent the schools followed the pro- posals of their association. But the response was uneven and spotty. Esther Lucile Brown reports, in the latest edition of her book on Social Work as a Profession (1942), that out of 42 member schools 7 made no mention of sociology in their admission requirements, 10 did not mention economics, 7 made no reference to political science, 9 said nothing about psychology, and nearly half failed to refer to biology. A good many relied, as some still do, upon general statements such as "enough work in the social sciences to provide a reasonably good background"; "20 semester hours in the social and biological sciences"; "necessary prerequisite training that will enable him to pursue with profit the courses desired"; or "a bachelor's degree, including courses in the social sciences."

The net result of the imperfect application of the 1937 policy, which was certainly far in advance of prevailing practice, is that during the 1920's and the 1930's a good many students entcred the schools without much or any social science background; while others entered with the uneven background of a major in one field, such as psychology or sociology, without much familiarity with others. The natural, and the proper, policy of the graduate schools to eliminate basic social science subjects from their curricula has thus made it possible for many students to complete professional training without more than a per- functory exposure to the social sciences. Certainly only a minority have had that rounded preparation in the four major subjects which the Curriculum Committee recommended in 1937. This lack of discipline in the social sciences for many of the recent generation of social workers (in spite of the fact that their technical training has improved immeasurably over that of their predecessors)

I Notably economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, history, and social psychology. There are dliii- culties in defining the area of "social science" which are frankly avoided here, for reasons of space limita- tion. Unless the context otherwise indicates the term will be used in this paper to refer particularly to the six basic subjects which have been mentioned.

2 "Social Work" is listed as one of the social sciences in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences published in New York in the early 1930's as well as in many other classifications.



306 SOCIAL FORCES

may go some distance to explain certain character- istics of our profession-such as the preoccupation of some members with techniques and skills to the exclusion of questions of social policy; the re- ceptivity of a fair number to an oversimplified Marxian or "party-line" explanation of social issues; the cautions argument of others that their "area of competence" does not permit them to pass judgment on such broad social issues as the Webbs, Jane Addams, Homer Folks, and Edith Abbott have discussed with authority and with vigor; the alliance of a great many with psychiatry far more than with the traditional social sciences; and the lack of equipment of a large number to assume major responsibilities of administration and policy foirnation.

THE WARTIME CRISIS

The inability of the graduate schools to provide a sufficient supply of trained personnel for the new social security services in the late 1930's and for the war services a little later created new pressures to reexamine the question of undergraduate preparation for social work. Many colleges, particularly in sections of the United States remote from graduate schools, developed undergraduate "majors in social work" during the depression period, including technical courses in case work and community organization along with the basic social sciences and sometimes field work in social agencies. Esther Lucile Brown lists 54 institutions outisde of the recognized graduate schools, which in 1942 offered some specialization in social work, overwhelmiiigly on the undergraduate level.3 In addition there were some 94 colleges which offered occasional social work courses, mainly under sociology departments. The graduates of these colleges readily found employment, and indeed were warmly welcomed, in the public social services and in such war agencies as the Red Cross and the United Service Organizations. A substantial number of the undergraduate schools organized an association in 1938, later to become the National Association of Schools of Social Administration, to represent their interests and their approach towards professional education. This new movement represented a very real challenge to the AASSW and the principles of graduate education for which it stood, and stimulated the Association

to renewed study of the undergraduate problem and of other issues.

In a series of recent reports the Preprofessional Committee of the AASSW has developed and extended a doctrine of preprofessional education for social work. The 1945 report states that:

The movement in social work education illustrates the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The thesis of education for social work ex- clusively on the graduate basis, threatened by its antithesis, the movement towards undergraduate training sponsored primarily by schools outside the As- sociation and the present need for workers by the agencies, eventually arrived at the synthesis, the acceptance of the idea of an integrated plan of social work education encompassing both graduate and undergraduate phases. Suclh planned progression provides for education for social work on three levels, beginning with an uiidergraduate curriculum largely preprofessional, progressing through the first graduate year of basic professional content, and ending in the second graduate year, which is directed largely toward specialization in different forms of social work.

In 1941 the Preprofessional Committee, giving heed to the grave shortage of social workers and the fact that many undergraduate institutions were actually giving some instruction in social work, retreated somewhat from the position assumed in the 1937 report of the Curriculum Committee and approved undergraduate programs which included, along with a good spread of work in the social scienices, certain elementary social work courses so long as "they are purely informational and aim to acquaint the student with the problems which require the knowledge and the skill of. the social worker." Field work during the undergraduate period, except in the sense of observation of agency activities, was opposed. There followed in 1944 some analysis of the types of social work courses that were considered suitable for the undergraduate sequences; even more important, the development of the doctrine that undergraduate preparation and graduate training should form parts of an integrated whole; and limited approval to some field work in agencies under strictly controlled conditions.

By 1945 the Committee was prepared to be much more specific about the total undergraduate curriculum. It made the important proposal that from 40 to 60 semester hours of the usual 120 hours required for the bachelor's degree be 3 Op. cit., pp. 32-35.




devoted to social science and social work courses- but no more than 10 hours to the latter. Strong approval of a fundamental base of liberal education is given in the statement that "the proportion of time devoted to preprofessional work should in no way limit the opportunity for a liberal education." It was proposed that the social science component of the curriculum should include the basic introductory courses in four out of six fields, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history, along with advanced courses in one or more fields.

The present position of the AASSW regarding undergraduate programs has been stated in a pamphlet issued in 1946. In this it is affirmed that "professional social work education is graduate education, based upon a liberal arts education with concentration in the Social Sciences." Sug- gestions are offered to Arts colleges which have or which propose to establish preprofessional programs. A list of recommended courses is given from which students may choose their work, and it is urged that the sequence should include the following content:

1. Principles of human association 2. An understanding of human motivation 3. Elements of statistical analysis and interpretation 4. Economic organization of society 5. American government 6. An introduction to the philosophies, principles,

methods, processes, and organization, of the social services.

The pamphlet also states that "because of the variation in offerings from college to college, the differences in course content and in teaching competency, and the desirability of flexibility, a rigid list of specific courses .. . does not seem suitable."

This new statement represents a marked advance over the position taken in 1937, when, to quote from another report of the Association, "the content of the prerequisites and the amount of such work taken by the undergraduate was left to the college adviser and the student.... The committee was unwilling to designate any one social science as more important to social work than any other."4 The Association has returned after various uncertainties and a considerable excursion into the question of social work courses

at the undergraduate level to an attempt to define more clearly the appropriate content of foundation work in the social sciences. This was made explicit by the report. of the Prepro- fessional Committee at the 1947 meeting of the AASSW in Chicago, when it was promised that much more serious work along this line would be undertaken.

THE NUB OF THE PROBLEM

Here indeed is the nub of the problem. This is the question which has not been explored adequately by the various committees of the Association, however much they have contributed to the formulation of sound principles since their excellent report of 1937. Esther Lucile Brown, an outside but sympathetic observer, expressed surprise in 1942 that "social work education seems to have not yet come firmly to grips with the problem of what use to make of the social sciences."5 She said further that "one of the chief stumbling blocks in the path of education for social work that is well rooted in a scientific background has been the hesitancy of the schools to require that their students should have had any prescribed amounts of sociology, psychology, economics, political science, anthropology, and biology. This lack of insistence has been a result of the youthfulness of professional training.... If social work is to be more than a narrow technique it is difficult to conceive of a type of professional training whose foundations are not laid in the social and biological sciences, since these sciences contain the basis for social work."5

It is surely more fundamental to examine carefully the social science foundations than it is to plan social work courses for undergraduates, an activity to which the Preprofessional Committee of the AASSW gave considerable attention for several years. For until the social science component of the undergraduate program is clearly outlined, there are no adequate premises for the social work part of the curriculum in terms of space and kinds of courses. My own guess is that careful analysis of the social science component will show that the best we can do for undergraduates in the usual four years of college work will be to give them a decent general education and a reasonable preparation in social science, including some introduction to human

4 AASSW, Compilation of Thtree Reports on Pre- professional Social Work Education (1946), p. 2. 5 Op. cit., pp. 50-53.



308 SOCIAL FORCES

behavior and to the social services, both of which have valid claims for inclusion in the curricula of the Arts colleges. If students continue to move after graduation to junior social work positions, as will undoubtedly be the case, they will have to obtain their more technical equipment on the job by means of in-service training. As Karl de Schweinitz has pointed out, students who are recruited to social security administration in this way, with a broad background of general education culminating in the study of society, are much more likely to become valuable staff members than if they have spent much of their time in college gaining smatterings of technical knowledge and scanty introductions to some skills.

But there are many difficult problems to be faced in working out a satisfactory undergraduate curriculum of general application. Among these problems are the following:

1. The intellectual task of defining the social science foundations for social work is difficult in the extreme. For social work is concerned with the whole man, and so it seems that we should draw upon the whole range of the social science contribution and more besides. When one under- takes to outline the subject-matter with which our students (not to mention our faculty members) should be familar, it is extraordinarily difficult to set reasonable limits. The Association's new pamphlet entitled Preprofessional Education for Social Work, which does not profess to "include all desirable courses," nevertheless lists 45 course titles in social science and related areas as appropriate for the undergraduate sequence. If these were all to be offered for only three hours per semester they would add up to 135 semester hours, some three times as much as the 40 to 50 semester hours which are recommended. Clearly it is quite impossible for the student in any college to study all of the subject-matter in the social sciences which looks desirable so long as the various courses are offered in their present form by the various college departments.

But somehow this job of intellectual analysis must be undertaken. We must try to determine priorities, and we must think through the problem so that we can give far more assistance than has been the case hitherto to colleges, to student advisers, and to the students themselves, in planning an integrated combination of the more significant work in the social science field.

I believe that one of the best ways of under-

taking this task is to return to the process of the AASSW Curriculum Committee of 1937, which tried to find out from the schools the basic content in social sciences which they considered fundamental to their various graduate professional courses. Such an exercise was undertaken in- formally last January in Chicago by the members of the Preprofessional Committee of the Asso- ciation, around a conference table, and it yielded very interesting results. I believe that if the analysis is carried out very carefully it will bring home to the instructors in the schools much more than ever before the urgency of insisting that all students have certain minimum preparation in specific social sciences for their graduate courses, and will contribute a great deal to the formulation of dearer policies for the undergraduate curricula.

2. A second major problem lies in the un- suitability of many existing college curricula from our point of view. The departmental system, which leads to the organization of instruction on a specialized subject-matter basis, with such a subject as economics being broken down into many course fragments, makes it difficult or impossible for a student to obtain such a combination of courses as will give him a broad, a pertinent, and an integrated spread of work in social science. It is a foundation in "social science" that we want our students to obtain, and it is not easy for them to do so in most colleges at present. The educational bricks which now exist will not necessarily make up the right kind of structure for our purposes.

Perhaps a promising lead for us to follow in our examination of this difficulty is the efforts of the social scientists to break down the departmental walls and to offer survey or orientation courses in the new programs of general education which are emerging. Columbia's "Contemporary Civilization," the basic courses in the social sciences at Chicago, and the new courses planned at Harvard, may represent the sort of thing that our students should have, not only in their first college years but also in the later years as well. Perhaps some development of such programs will be needed to cope adequately with the technical barriers which now stand in the way of good majors in social science.

3. A third difficulty may be the resistance of Arts faculties, on a variety of grounds, to curriculum revisions to meet our specifications. At its best, the Liberal Arts college is firmly com-




mitted to a doctrine of "education for living," and those who represent the Arts tradition may look with suspicion upon us and the representatives of other professions if we appear to ask them to contribute to "education for working." Person- ally I do not believe that there should be a conflict between these two elements in education, for I think that both of them are indispensable, both in the Arts colleges and in the professional schools. The professional schools of Law, Medicine, and Theology are older in their University associations than the Arts colleges, and they have a long and honorable tradition as the cradles of 'liberal" professions. However much this tradition has been debased in some professional schools of the modern university on this continent, it is still strong in the best of them. We, among the newest of the professional schools, have a great "liberal" contribution to make to education and we should try to make it in cooperation with our Arts colleagues. But we shall have to reassure them on this score to show them that we are not mere Philistines interested only in techniques and tricks of the trade, before they agree that we do not threaten the verities of the "Arts tradition" for which the best among them stand.

There are also other grounds for opposition from the Arts colleges to our ideas. The subject- matter specialists in some of the social science departments may not look with much favour upon inter-departmental or group majors. The argument may be made (and with some validity) that a student can only gain intellectural discipline by working seriously in some branch of the social sciences, and that it will be far better for us to enroll students with trained minds than those who have dabbled in everything from Social Maladjustment through Real Estate Management to Comparative Religion. There is something to this, particularly if a very wide range of elected courses in the social sciences is permissible. But there is also reason to believe, as the experience of the colleges at Columbia and Chicago suggests, that intellectual discipline can be developed no less in the proper study of the broad area of social science than in the specialized study of some branch of it.

4. A fourth difficulty is that in some colleges there will probably continue to be a good deal of pressure for the inclusion of a wide range of practical social work courses. It is in the colleges which are under pressure to prepare students

quickly for jobs that this problem is likely to be most acute. These are the colleges where the Arts tradition is by no means strong; and where the Arts faculty may succumb all too easily to specious arguments for the inclusion of vocational courses.

WORK IN HAND

Although the task of defining and building our social science foundations is a huge and difficult one, we are prepared to tackle it more seriously today than ever before. The progress of the AASSW in defining the issue has been most valuable; and as it was suggested at the beginning the new graduate curriculum of 1944 gives us far better premises for approaching the problem than in the past. During the last two years the Association has had a full-time staff member, at least intermittently, to collect information, to study the problem, and to assist undergraduate colleges in the revision of their curricula. A still more fundamental study of the whole question is in prospect under the new National Council on Social Work Education, which was established in 1946 at the instance of the American Asso- ciation of Social Workers, the AASSW, and the NASSA (National Association of Schools of Social Administration). This Council should be able to make a far more thorough investigation of our educational problems, including the question of social science foundations, than has been possible hitherto.

It is also to be noted that there has been a substanitial amount of vigorous experimentation with pre-social work curricula on the part of some member schools of the Association and many undergraduate colleges. Chicago and Minnesota have had preprofessional curricula for a good while. In 1942 my colleagues and I of the School of Social Welfare at the University of California were able to work out in friendly fashion, in collaboration with undergraduate departments, the group major in social welfare; and I understand that since I left Berkeley in 1944 this undergraduate program has become very successful and very popular among the students. In many colleges throughout the United States as well as a few in Canada, there are now available for students fairly well developed sequences in the social sciences which are planned definitely to prepare them for living, for working at junior jobs in the social work field, or for entrance to the graduate



310 SOCIAL FORCES

schools of social work. The experience of these experiments should go a long way to help us to clarify our thinking on social science foundations. Their existence guarantees an increasing flow of students to the schools of social work who are better prepared than in the past.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENTERPRISE

The prospective gains from a further and more realistic attack upon the problem of social science foundations are enormous. Obviously we shall have students with better equipment coming to the graduate schools when the battle is won. The schools will be able to complete the process of throwing off the remnants of basic social science courses which some of them still offer, and will thus be able to free their curricula still more for the heavy demands of strictly professional work. The level of their professional work should improve materially as students enter their various courses with adequate preparation. From my own teaching experience in such a subject as public welfare administration I can testify with en- thusiasm to the far greater accomplishment of students who have a good background in political science, induding public administration, than of those who can scarely distinguish a county from a grant-in-aid. With more intensive training at the graduate level it should be possible for us to do a distinctly better job with our students in their first year of graduate work so that they can go out to certain positions as practitioners with relative competence to work under good supervision. In this way we can contribute still more to the bridging of the terrible gap between the supply of trained personnel and the demand which now exists and which will continue to exist. The general development of good standards for undergraduate training should go a long way to offset the threat to graduate professional education which has been posed by some of the weaker colleges offering an array of technical courses. If we insist upon really adequate social science foundations for our students, there will be a valid job for the undergraduate colleges to do which will consume most of their energies and will give them no time to dabble in technical instruction which should be given at the graduate level.

Finally, it seems to me possible that our work on the problem of social science foundations will give us a brilliant opportunity of linking up with the great movement for educational reform which is now under way in the Arts colleges, and which is typified by the Harvard report, General Edu- cation in a Free Society. The Harvard report, like the Yale report and many others, and like the plans in effect at Chicago and at Columbia, stresses the importance of broad survey courses in the first two years, and leaves ample room for specialization in the social sciences during the last two years in college. Our own requirements for undergraduate preparation are completely in harmony with the approach of the Harvard report. Above all, we want to have broadly educated men and women entering our schools. We want them first of all to have a foundation of general education; and on top of this a secondary foundation in the social sciences. Given this equipment, we should be prepared to offer them the specifically professional equipment which they need to be effective members of the profession of social work.

Thus it seems to me that we have good prospects of finding allies amongst the most thoughtful men and women of the Arts faculties. We are unusual among professional schools in having set up the requirement of the Arts degree for admission to professional training. Perhaps we can lead a movement among the professional schools of law, medicine, engineering, and business, to make such a requirement general, and to link up with the efforts of those in the colleges who are trying to revitalize general education. It seems to me that one of the great tasks in the modern university is to integrate somehow the activities of the Arts faculties and the professional schools, which in many cases have been operating more or less in water-tight compartments.

By looking to our social science foundations as we have never looked before, we may not only solve our own major problems of professional education and approach maturity in our professional field; we may also make a contribution of major importance, in alliance with the movement for general education, to the solution of some of the most vexing problems of the modern university.



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The Social Science Foundations of Education for Social Work