dignity, tolerance, and poise, give assurance of helpfulness which makes the community more patient in waiting for the ultimate value of the student. The trainee, in her relationship to other agencies and people in the community, does show a purposeful sincerity and concern which is recognized. By her faith she calls forth cooperation from the community. Recently an attorney stopped during a busy time of day to act as an interpreter for a fellow-countryman. The client kept repeating to the visitor that the lawyer had told him not to work. As the situation stood, the man had to return to work if he was to have his wages supplemented by the Industrial Commission. When the attorney, who was also a leader among his countrymen, explained this to the client in the presence of the visitor, he understood. The industrial world was then challenged in a time of depression, and employment was secured for him. After drawing two weeks' pay, when he had not received any for a year, the client's attitude was changed.

In considering the scholarship paid to students, and their family count, the material cost of care rendered by the trainee is more than that of the trained visitor. In the year 1924 the senior visitors of the Associated Charities cared for fifty families a month at a cost of $2.50 per family, while the student cared for an average of thirty families at a cost of $2.80 per family. This is exclusive of extra supervision necessary, and without considering the ways in which the trainee is a liability.

In Mr. Tufts's "Education and Training for Social Work" he alludes many times to a comparison of the training in the medical profession and that for social work. It is an accepted fact in the medical group that hospitals with nurses' training schools and corps of internes function to a greater advantage in the community than those without them! The community, too, is coming to a realization of this fact.

We agree, then, with Miss Ella McKay, who states in her article in the February Family, "The training job is a fascinating one," for the student brings to the community a purposeful sincerity and concern which promises ultimate helpfulness. She brings to the client joyousness, and unalloyed faith, and the desire to help to the utmost of her ability. She brings to the staff of the agency the idealistic spontaneity of youth, joyousness, fresh viewpoints of other fields, and stimulation to new life, so that if the training be wisely administered, the student may be of infinite value to the organization in maintaining professional standards.

HOW THE AGENCIES AND THE SCHOOLS MAY COOPERATE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CURRICULUM

Mrs. Eva W. White, Simmons College of Social Work, Boston

There is no form of training for the professions in which so-called "field experience" is more important than the training of prospective social workers. All that is known about the habits and actions of human beings can be taught; the most skilled exposition can be given as to the technique that has been evolved out of social procedure, and students can be drilled in the same in the lecture room, but all this will leave them helpless to meet successfully the demands which will be made upon them unless the opportunity has been given to meet first-hand the personal and social challenge presented by society. Of all forms of education, social work can least afford to burden itself with the shibboleths of the old academic methods.

From this point of view two tests should be applied to the educational opportunities offered in the training courses for social work: first, the experience of the instructors, and second, the relation between the classroom and field experience. As to the instructors, are they persons who have actually been on the firing line, and have they made good in the particular matters about which they are teaching, and are they still involved in social processes enough to be kept alive to the subtleties of individual and group situations? If there had to be a choice between the facile lecturer whose personal power with actual situations has never been tried, or whose experience rests far in the past, or the instructor who does not have as much power in the lecture room, but who gives to exposition all that atmosphere of reality that makes fact grip, and whose illustrative material is vivid because it is fresh, the latter should be given the preference. Fortunately, because so much of social work is by way of a kind of teaching, we can, somewhat more readily than the other branches of professional training, combine the practitioner and the teacher.

There is a kind of practitioner who does well, but who has not brought to formulation any underlying philosophy, nor reasoned out the why of procedure. Certainly such a practitioner cannot teach. This is as bad as the theorist who cannot act. We must have neither the one nor the other. We must obtain persons on our faculties who can act on the subject-matter of the instruction, or, conversely, who can present the reasons on which technique is based.

This much time has been given to the matter of class instruction because there should be no sharp division between the class and field experience. One should flow into the other and be unified in their mental acceptance by the students. The field experience should illustrate the lecture material, and the lecture work should explain and reason through the situations which the student meets.

It has come generally to be accepted, I believe, that two years of training should be required in our schools unless those who attend have had special

preliminary training or experience, in which case the time can be shortened. It is also becoming more and more the custom to have the work of the first year divided between the academic work (50 per cent) and the field work (50 per cent), and to divide the work of the second year in the proportion of two-thirds field work and one-third seminar discussion. The question now arises as to the range the field work should take. Personally, I believe that the first year should give to the student a rounded non-specialized experience on three planes of action, remedial, preventive, and constructive, and within a geographic unit, such that the student gets a comprehensive understanding of social work and does not become confused. This would mean, in a metropolis, concentrating on a section of a city or on a neighborhood, and building out to the city as a whole on those lines where the city action directly affects the local situation or where a city institution plays its part in a neighborhood.

In order to get the influence of city-wide work understood as a background for intensive community study it is well to devote a certain amount of time to this at the beginning of the year. If a school is situated in a city which is the capital of the state it is important to go from state departments to city departments, then to the local community.

With us it has been encouraging during the last few years to have met with a most cordial response on the part of the public officials, who have been glad to meet the students and to explain the responsibilities of their departments.

It was pointed out previously that there are three aspects of our social action to be considered: the remedial, the preventive, and the constructive. In each experience which meets the students, the practice work should swing out and touch these three aspects as far as that is possible, in something of this fashion. Take, for example, the broken home. The immediate reason for the broken home may be desertion, incompatibility, habits which make separation inevitable. The deeper or underlying causes may be hasty marriage, difficult childhood which left its mark written in the low personal standards on the part of the man or the woman, or both, or the intricate network of poverty due to low vocational ability, general ignorance, or the thousand and one other difficulties met in such instances. The first thing is, of course, to find a way out of the acute home situation as it is. The steps leading to the possible prevention of such situations would be analyzed as follows: The student should study marriage laws which govern the community. Is an intention of marriage demanded in advance of the ceremony? Are so-called "marriage marts" flourishing? How much responsibility do public officials and clergymen take in regard to acting on requests to be married when there is every evidence that such a step would be unwise? How are divorces granted? In so far as any of these safeguards of marriage are not what they should be, the student should be led to take part in an effort to make the situation more protective of the home.

Then, from the approach of pushing upward those standards of normal family life that stabilize family unity, the student should consider what community

resources there are that are educating parents in regard to the physical and mental character of children, in order that a generation may be brought up that will have true and strong family ties. What opportunities are there for vocational guidance and vocational education and placement, in order that economic efficiency may be established? What is the moral tone in the general community? How rich are the recreational opportunities for young and for old? The answer to these questions would give the student the relation of the causes which may have led to the particular broken home, and the community responsibility for the same.

Now, it is impossible to get on without specialties in social work. The demands on the time and resources of the individual social worker and on the individual society make a specialty necessary, but a worker will never become pigeonholed, nor will a society manned by workers trained as above lose its contacts with those other societies in the field of social work that are ranged in the preventive and constructive field.

During the last term of the first year the student might be allowed to move forward to what may be later a chosen specialty by majoring in some particular phase of the field other than the family welfare field. This is in order to avoid a mistake in the final choice of a specialty. This would mean that the student would go from two terms of experience with us in a family welfare society to a children's aid society, let us say, or to some branch of the psychiatric field, or to some form of community work.

The second year of work is, with us, arranged thus: thirty hours for work with an agency in the field of the student's chosen specialty, six hours of lecture work and seminar discussions, and six hours for preparation. This experience should be arranged on the unit basis in something of the following fashion:

Medical social service: second year.-The second year provides for thirty hours a week of practical work, as follows: September to December, inclusive, general hospital or dispensary social work; January to April 15, experience in special clinics, such as children's, orthopedic, neurological, and cardiac, and in hospital wards; April 15 to May 15, experience in social work in a small hospital in another community; May 15 to June 8, seminar discussions. Throughout the second year there are medical lectures with clinic observations. The lecture courses required in the second year are: seminar on medical social problems, clinical psychiatry, and psychiatric social work. A thesis is required.

Under this scheme a definite amount of time is given to specific ranges of experience in the chosen field-in this instance, medical social service. The student's power is gauged in connection with the work of a given clinic. Then, as the student goes on to the next, efficiency is again brought out. A student should be given time in the administrative office, and should know something about finance from the point of view of the treasurer's office. The annual report and the publicity methods should be gone over. There should be an intensive bulk of training, so that the student can be trained in continuous responsibility

in filling a position of leadership on a committee or taking some definite responsibility in presenting cases at conferences.

Lecture and field material.—The closer the correlation between the lecture and the field material, the better. Consecutive days of field work as preferable to one day of field work and one day in class, or broken days, such as one-half day of field work and one-half day of class work. There should be certain consecutive periods of field work, but not too long a period should elapse between the field work and the interpretation of the same, because it is essential that the broad significance of new experiences be driven into the understanding. Difficult mental attitudes (which one often meets, unfortunately) have often been developed because at some point in growth discrimination was not sharpened, nor perspective broadened and relative values brought out. Difficult mental attitudes on these lines must be caught and straightened out quickly. It is in this respect primarily that the organized educational method should be superior to the apprentice method, and it is therefore essential to interweave the theory and practice in the field and then to bring the student out of the immediate atmosphere of field work in order to survey what has been happening. Much of the classroom work should be discussion, as students need to be made expressive, and one student stirs another far more than does the instructor, usually.

Field centers. If it is possible to use the agencies that have been developed out of the heart of the local life, it seems preferable, rather than to organize work in order to give field experience. The students would tend to be better trained where all artificial elements are eliminated as much as possible.

Arrangements for training with local agencies.—Arrangements for training should be made with the heads of societies and, through the heads, with the boards of directors, so that the boards clearly understand the educational value of their cooperation and the contribution they make to our sphere of action. This recognition makes for permanency of relationship and for growth of effectiveness, and the school becomes rooted in the team play of local interests.

Breadth of training versus the specialty.—It must be remembered that all educational branches are tending to see the dangers of overspecialization, and that breadth of outlook does not preclude skill in specialized effort, but safeguards it. It is then a question of organizing to give both, and of so lengthening our courses that we can give breadth of experience as well as specific skill.

The relation of the field guides to the director of field work and to the faculty.— The director of field work should arrange the appointments of the students with the chosen field guides. The director of field work should receive the reports from the field and should confer with the students and the field guides frequently. The director of field work brings to the attention of the members of the departments matters concerning more efficient classroom work, or points out where the classroom work has been good. The director arranges the conferences between heads of the departments and the field guides.