Education for Social Welfare in the Postwar World--A Five-Year Curriculum Plan

Abstract

T HE problems of reconversion are at the focus of attention today. The interests of Congress, industry, labor, and the consumer are all at stake and their energies are being concentrated on ways and means of effecting the transition to a peacetime economy with the minimum of friction and the maximum of efficiency. Education, too, has its problems of reconversion. Throughout the country academic associations and faculty committees are busily engaged in curriculum planning for the postwar world. Following the ASTP and other drastic wartime changes and adjustments patterns of peacetime education have to be designed for the new world and campus life redefined. Among other aspects of education, vocational and professional training has its own peculiar and pressing problems. Medicine has been protected and apart from acceleration has not suffered materially. Legal education, on the other hand, has received a distinct set-back as a result of the war. In the social work field training has lagged, as we shall see, while the demand for welfare workers has increased. Three main problems confront those responsible for replanning social work education: (1) the proper relationship between general liberal arts or cultural education on the one hand and vocational training on the other in the face of the increasing interest in and demand for the latter; (2) the probable increased need for trained, or partially trained social welfare workers to deal not only with the rehabilitation of veterans and with personnel problems resulting from the predicted 12 to 19 million job changes, but also to operate the expanded public assistance program that is predicted, and (3) to provide social work training to discharged service men and women who desire it. Since the personnel situation confronting social work today is complex and not due exclusively to the war the attempt will be made first to analyze the nature and extent of the shortage before considering possible educational adjustments. THE GROWING NEED FOR SOCIAL WORKERS