Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

490

PUBLIC OPINION

of the future" or of Professor Queen's social work "where skilled services are at the disposal of democratically organized communities and states," or Professor Tuft's ideal
"to look at human society in the broad way, to ask for its needs, to anticipate its future
treatment, to search out the causes of its maladjustments, to exercise some directing
influence on its greater future." Many of the obstacles, objections, and difficulties
have been pointed out before. There are, however, certain other apparent difficulties,
both from within and without the field of social work, which should be pointed out.
Among the most important are those obstacles that have been set up or allowed to grow
up by the institutions themselves and by certain of the social workers, and would-be
social workers, not representative of the whole method and spirit of social work.
Omitting for the present the difficulties encountered by social work in its fundamental task of adjusting human relationships in the home and family, we may note
first the common situation from the viewpoint of the school and education. Perhaps
the greatest offenders in this field are the college and university professors, and those
who form and administer curricula. Among the last groups to be won over to the
values to be found in instruction and training in social work, in social laboratories, and
field work, and in a sound application of sociology to modem social life have been the
trained specialists in college and university in the departments of general literature,
the classics, pure science, and even in history and government. Even the professors
of education, forgetting so soon the hostility to professional training of teachers which
they were called upon to combat, have fallen vigorously to making the same sort of
attack, with the same lack of information and perspective, which was directed toward
them a few years ago. Illustrations are legion. And the professors of economics
have stood afar off or have passed by on the other side. The professors of sociology,
too, have sometimes taken the unreasonable position of judging social work as a whole
from certain parts and individuals, and have come to erroneous conclusions without
sufficient evidence, or without being willing to make the actual needed contributions
suggested by their criticism. Similar position has been found in the public-school
system and in the state and national conferences of an educational nature. It is not
intended to deny the fact that some of the objections stated grow out of imperfectly
developed or defective examples of social work; but these will be cited in the further
discussion of the difficulties which social workers have placed in their own way and
even as have other professions.
In much the same way social work has met opposition from other institutions.
The representatives of the church have been afraid of the substitution of social service
for the social gospel and have turned their efforts too often toward the ridicule, by
false analogy, of the methods of social work. Officials of local, state, and national
government have generally minimized the importance of social work, and so long as
they misunderstood its scope and method or so long as they could hold out they have
uniformly opposed it or tolerated it as a necessary adjunct. In the field of industry,
employers have been afraid of the social worker and of the methods of social work, even
in the great programs of industrial social work now sponsored and supported by hosts
of industries. And the community itself, the comprehensive institution of them all,
has looked with suspicion upon the coming of the social worker and has doubted wholeheartedly the efficacy of the social work program. In most of these instances, the
mention of which is a commonplace history, there has been the usual provincial tendency of each institution to consider its own function and destiny to be separately