what is to be done in the town (particularly the small town) where there are no academic facilities for training? Should the agencies, through community. chests or other means, raise scholarships for promising recruits which will enable them to attend a school in another community? No satisfactory answer can be given to these questions at the present time; they have been raised in the hope that we may at least begin to look for such an answer, for it is difficult to see how they can be evaded indefinitely if we are to face our problem of recruiting squarely, and face it squarely we must if we wish to build concretely for the future, and not to allow our aspirations for the profession to dissolve into the thin air of pious pronouncements about desirable personality and adequate training. SOME ETHICAL ELEMENTS IN LEADERSHIP IN SOCIAL WORK Development of personality in its higher aspects and the more significant expressions of conduct are dependent upon complex social groupings. "Groupal phases" of our life may be considered as-in fact, are an environmental challenge. Adjustments involve a never ending process. The process of these adjustments is conditional upon prevailing standards in the family, the neighborhood, the town, the nation, the church, the club, the business, the profession, and the like. Ethics is a scientific attempt to crystallize prevailing so-called "right" behavior into codes, with synchronous aspirations to explore the field of human conduct and to develop such additional socially useful formulas as are consistent with individual good. "What is his viewpoint" is the vernacular for "What are his business or professional associations." "Viewpoint," if we speak broadly, is tantamount to the prevailing ethics of a group. For example, the possession of the degree Doctor Medicae precludes the use of advertising as a recruiting force in building a clientèle. It is assumed to mean a deep interest in curative and preventive medicine, an effort to keep abreast of scientific knowledge in that field, a recognition of the value of human life, and a dedication to the program, individually and socially, of prolonging the same. Physicians and surgeons are clannish. They associate themselves together. The group legislates for the individual. "In good standing" in the local medical association, involving relations with state and national associations, is of vital concern. Not only are there things a good doctor will not do; there are also things a good doctor is not allowed to do and yet retain the respect and support of his associates. Their ethics are codified. Social workers, in their efforts to build up professional standards of conduct, will eventually evolve a code of ethics. This will be a significant step leading to the improvement of the quality of social work, because it will lead to a higher personnel among social workers. Ethics means the science of behavior as good or bad, judged by its effect on others. Even with an accepted definition in the field of ethics, social workers will still be obliged to struggle, and struggle hard, to establish the good, rule out the indifferent, and eliminate those workers who aspire to the name and to the emoluments of the profession without the corresponding willingness to make the heavy sacrifices incident to success in this important field of human endeavor. Social work may be viewed as organized activity to promote such adjustment among individuals, stimulated to the greatest possible degree of efficient behavior, as will count most for the common welfare. It never isolates individuals. The very word "social" avows its communal aspects. Its fundamental purpose is to teach people how to live. The good of all inheres in the concept of social work. The idea has been advanced that the day is not far distant when the state will take cognizance of the delicate nature of service involved in trying to make helpful social adjustments. By law we require registration of physicians, dentists, barbers, plumbers, automobile drivers, vendors of shoe laces, etc. Those who deal with delicate human relationships, aggravated as they are by all distractions of our intricate civilization, are allowed to tinker with boy problems, girl problems, domestic difficulties, leisure time and industrial problems, do this, that, and the other in the name of individual happiness and the common welfare. State restraints are meager. Social work is a big and a hard undertaking. First, I want to point out the duty of preparation-initial and continuous. In medicine, a specialist is always one who is grounded in a general knowledge of the human body. A pediatrician, for example, has taken a general course in medicine, as has an oculist or an ear and throat specialist. In all the professions the content of training is becoming broader and deeper. The effort on the part of some social service agencies to take raw material, administer a few doses of instruction in case work, and label the result, after six months' or a year's so-called "training" a case-worker, is commendable in so far as the intention is to start such workers on the path of hard work. The method, however, finds no justification if there is an intention to produce social workers. Before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club in April, 1926, President Clarence C. Little of the University of Michigan made some interesting comments. He was talking about the need of selective requirements in regulating intake for university matriculation: The aims of our colleges are generally high and idealistic, but the efforts to see that the applicants for admission are able to qualify for entrance in an institution possessing those ideals are few and far between. A steadily increasing sense of public obligation and duty is the great outstanding need of the citizenry of a nation faced with our problems. We can scarcely appreciate, I believe, the seriousness of the conditions which we, as a country, must face in the next 25 or 35 years. To send out youth without giving them a sense of social humility and the need for lifelong service is just as blind as it would have been to send our men to the front in the world-war totally ignorant of all phases of trench warfare and having only antiquated tactics at their command. It is not kind to admit immature or frivolous or narrowly selfish boys and girls to college today. It is not democratic to do so. It is fair to assume that in a democracy the admission of common obligations lies at the basis of progress. To assure ourselves, in so far as we can, that the boy or girl desiring a college education, largely at public expense, is able to show at least the fundamentals of a democratic social personality is our clear duty. Socially, moreover, there is a very grave danger involved. Young people already expect and receive many public and private privileges. To remove the competitive phase from admission to college would not lead to democracy, but to a sort of educational bolshevism, where all available public funds for higher education are to be equally distributed to all applicants, regardless of fitness or merit. This would result in lowering standards and in a complete breaking down of all efforts to build up unselfishness or self-abnegation. College education should be given to every boy or girl of courage, honesty, and self-denying vision who places service above self and obligation above opportunity. It should be denied those unable to grasp these ideals on the grounds that the world needs leaders in social progress and in adjustment of human relations more than it needs youth trained in increasing its own salary. If this is true of youth seeking a college degree, what should be said of seriousness of purpose on the part of men and women seeking to become in a real sense "leaders in social progress and in adjustment of human relations"? According to Professor John L. Gillin, of the University of Wisconsin, the objectives of social work education imply the coordination of knowledge and experience to produce results of the greatest importance to society. They imply vision in us who are engaged in training social workers which may well make us humble. They demand an understanding of the vastly complicated factors at work in society which produce the deepest tragedies on the one hand, and on the other, the finest social personalities; which result in maladjustments which destroy lives, and cost money and suffering, and which also give opportunity to talent and genius to develop for the blessing of mankind. They challenge us who are engaged in the task of discovering and developing social engineers to coordinate learning and technique, and focus it upon the problem of skilful organization of personality and social agency for the adjustment of warped or threatened personalities and of social conditions which are warping personalities to unsocial attitudes. They call us to look upon this difficult task of training as the highest kind of social statesmanship. Whether we be social worker, social work teacher, or social work publicist, a lofty ideal of this challenging sort "may well make us humble." Social work may be congratulated, and social work of the future is safe, if those who are professionally engaged in developing social workers continue to "look upon this difficult task of training as the highest kind of social statesmanship." Not only the task of training, but social work itself, is social statesmanship of the highest kind. The time will come in social work, in my judgment, when there will be a relation between executive social workers who may be classed as social statesmen and those who assist in the performance of social work, similar to the relation that exists between physicians and nurses. So executive social workers, who J. L. Gillin, "Restatement of the Objectives of Social Work Education: from the Point of View of a Teacher of Social Science," Journal of Social Forces, Vol. III, No. 3. really should be social engineers and statesmen, will find that many subordinate workers skilled in the technique of some particular phase of the problem but not appreciating, and not devoting themselves to, community problems as a whole, are as nurses to physicians. It will be found true also that many of the socalled "subordinate social workers" will develop vision and grasp, and by their suggestions and behavior will start many an intellectual process in the minds of the so-called "social engineers." However, those who are executive social workers by virtue of the exactions of rigid standards must be leaders in the development of thought leading to social progress. As was well said at the National Conference in Denver in 1925, "The best methods can be ruined by untrained and untrainable people." Intellectual vigor is a paramount requirement. Nobody but a fool would attempt to deny the important rôle played by the emotions in the successful conduct of social work. Only a fool would quarrel with the proposition that emotion must consort with reason. Therein social workers will agree with Page: "In strong characters, therefore, emotion is the servant of a self-control actuated by ideals; while in weak ones, emotion is the master of a volition not dominated by a strong concept of ends and aims." Likewise will we not quarrel with Ray Stannard Baker when he says: "There are no miracles in progress; there is only the plodding but beautiful adventure of inquiry and education." Inquiry and education have definitely proved a few things in social work. Despite this there is always a ready crop of splendid people, busy with uncoordinated welfare activities, whose outstanding qualifications are pleasing personality, social standing, and an abundant supply of that kind of underlying attitude with which hell is said to abundantly paved. The second duty is the cultivation of breadth of vision. It is an ethical error for anybody to be engaged in social work whose power of vision is limited to his own specialty. It is quite possible to appreciate the importance of one's own job and at the same time have a fair measure of appreciation of the activities of social workers engaged in a different line of activity. I heard the chief of staff of an educational health center make the following statement: "We have been going along pretty well for the last fifteen years, and we propose to go along in the very same way for the next fifteen years." This happened anno Domini 1926. Anyone who has officially reviewed the budgets of social service organizations in a community chest has frequently heard expressions somewhat similar to this: "Our work is so important that it can stand no budget reduction. The fact is that we can take almost any amount of money and use it to good advantage. If there exists the necessity of cutting budgets, cut the budgets of other organizations, and, for the good of the community, leave ours intact." If specialization in social work has any outstanding sin it is that of smugness. It is a good thing to be satisfied with one's self-to a degree. Enthusiasm and conviction about one's own job are desirable qualities. That state of mind, 'Trade Morals, pp. 132-33. 'Survey, February 1, 1926, p. 557. however, which assumes one type of social service effort to be the ultima thule is fatal to progress. Such a condition is comparable to that type of religious thought which naïvely assumes that Almighty God has chosen one particular sect to be the repository of all truth. In the field of religion this way of thinking produces much theology. No one denies that. Whether or not it produces much religion is a matter of conjecture. There is a vast difference between religion and theology. Theology is a razor to split a hair. Religion is a knife to cut a slice of bread. So social work specialization is tending toward distinct stratification, desiring agency gratification even at the expense of community betterment. It is amazing how people become enthused on the importance of presentday happenings, failing to take account of the ephemeral nature of much of their own work. The charity organization movement took itself rather too seriously during the past two decades, and suffered partial deflation. The mothers' pension movement was, by its earnest but too zealous advocates, expected to reduce the relief problem to tractable proportions. There are signs that the latest actor on this stage of narrow-mindedness is the community chest movement. I believe in this movement, and see in it great possibilities for good. In fact, I think it has already achieved much good. I must say, however, that there are alarming tendencies within this movement which seem to me to indicate disaster if the trend is not checked. If the time comes when a small group of people in any community assume to dictate what types of social service movements should be allowed to function, thus exercising a benevolent birth control in the field of welfare agencies; if a few autocrats, consciously or unconsciously so, tend to check pioneering in the field of social work; if the community chest movement finds itself unable to avoid provincialism and to work out a program involving proper support of non-local movements, it does not require a prophet to say that the movement will die, and it does not require a leader in the field of ethics to say that it ought to die. The community chest movement ought to stand for breadth and vision. If the time comes when it is viewed as an end rather than as a means-goodbye, community chest. Third, the social worker must believe in his job. If he does not, what right has he to be in it, and what right has he to expect to make a success of it? Cynicism is more or less a matter of temperament. That social worker, however, who, while engaged in making motions in his profession, incidentally taking a living wage for his effort, has lost faith in the possibility of approaching the objectives for which he is supposed to be striving, should go into communion with himself about the propriety of continuing therein. I submit that the social worker who clings to the emoluments of the profession, scanty though they be, with a cynical attitude toward all his associates and toward his own work is guilty of sabotage. He is destroying the products of labor and is negative in his accomplishments. If he is a man of conviction, he will be a man of enthusiasm. Again, temperament will, of course, play a large part. Some people bubble over and some do not. He will have his ups and downs in this regard, but he |