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able, could be credited to or charged against the family agency, but the connection between its work and this group of results could be studied carefully and a reasonably accurate balance could be struck.

In so far as general inquiries and requests for special observations put any new burden whatsoever upon the teachers, we must be at great pains to see that the thorough putting through of our own task really helps theirs. In some cities there have been board of education rules requiring that all access to teachers must be by letter. In one, for a little while, the rule was promulgated, even, that no public school teacher should give any information to a social agency. The results were so disastrous in their effects upon school work that the rule was soon set aside. No teacher should be called from his class-room work to answer a question that someone else can answer just as well; when the record contains what is wanted, the record should be made to serve. No routine questions asked for the sake of filling out a face card and leading nowhere should be allowed to interrupt his busy day. But the cooperative result in which the social agency helps the school quite as much as the school the agency is the thing to aim for. Anything that influences the character of a child must concern its teachers. They are concerned with, though not directly responsible for, improvement in home conditions; they are interested in the segregation of the mentally defective; in the cure and prevention of physical and mental disease; in the reduction of irregular school attendance, improper and under-feeding, and dead-end occupations; in the abolition of premature employment; and in the prevention of that waste of unusual ability which comes from lack of longer training. It would be foolish to make teachers responsible for these reforms, but they are vitally interested in them. From the illustrations already given it is evident that social workers are interested too—are deeply interested in all of them, and have already borne no small part in the improvements achieved in these very directions. To utilize to the full this common interest is a fundamental part of the technique of consultation with School Sources.

School Sources of information are among the very best, but every source has the defects of its qualities. Teachers see home condi

tions from one point of view only, and, unless they have had occasion to think of human relations in disadvantaged families from other angles also, they are liable to fall into the error of thinking that any home adjustment which meets school needs, even temporarily, must be the right one.

A large institution for orphans or half-orphans finds that the testimony of teachers, though absolutely necessary, is often biased by the idea that certain statements will get the child into the institution and that certain others will keep him out. If the teacher is "sorry for his mother," or eager to get a troublesome pupil out of her classes (to give two reasons often encountered), her personal bias even leads sometimes to suppressions or misstatements of fact. A number of records submitted for study illustrate this. The misstatements are more often made on the application blank, however. When seen face to face, with an opportunity to have explained to her the real uses of the institution and the possible alternative plans, in case the application is rejected, she is usually quite frank, both in her description of the pupil's characteristics and in her explanations of her former statements.

II. METHOD

A probation officer finds that she secures definite vantage ground for a first interview with the parents of a boy or girl of school age who has been arrested, by going first to the school. She gets what she can about age, disposition, physical, mental, and moral calibre, from the child's own teacher, and also such information as the teacher has, though this is often very incomplete, about relatives and home conditions.

Needless to say, such inquiries—any inquiries in fact-must not be made in the hearing of the other children, or in such a way as to attract their attention. Sometimes school officials do not seem to realize the dangers of public questioning and public discussion of home and personal affairs—a principal will send for a child and question him, if not before his own class, then before another. This must be discouraged, of course.

It is difficult to make any suggestions about the choice between seeing principals and seeing individual teachers that could be applied to all school systems. In some cities, social workers always go to the principal first, who calls the teacher if necessary. The principal may know other children in the family, and the teacher only the one child; the principal has the record, but the individual teacher, on the other hand, has had better opportunity of observing

evidences of home training, and of noting the health and personal characteristics of his pupil.

Whenever information of value has been procured from a teacher that has later been put to use with definite results, or whenever new developments or new plans might possibly be of interest to him, the opportunity should not be lost of showing how his work is related to that of the social worker. A letter written, a message sent, or a visit paid may increase co-operation later. Many failures in co-operation are directly due to the failure to knit more closely the temporary contacts and natural introductions that come through case work.

It sometimes happens that a social agency is able to justify and explain a teacher's position, where it has been misunderstood, as in the following instance:

A boy of twelve who became insane seemed to have been particularly excited over his school teacher's cruelty. The family and the family doctor (a neighborhood practitioner) were inclined to feel bitterly toward the school. The medicalsocial service department interested in the case made an investigation and became convinced that the boy's school treatment had been good. The department's record adds, "Letter written to family doctor explaining to him that investigation made by social service does not reveal any abuse in the school. Social service is anxious for him to understand this, as he might be influential in the neighborhood in correcting any misapprehension."

Whatever has been said here about the utilization of the educator's experience and point of view applies equally, of course, to home and school visitors, to teachers in settlements, to boys' and girls' club workers, directors of playgrounds and recreation centers, librarians of children's rooms in public or special libraries, and to Sunday school teachers. Fellow pupils must be consulted in a few child-protective tasks, and the characteristics of companions and of the gang leader (where there is one) must be taken into account in many of them.

Last of all, it should be noted that a certain lack of sympathy and understanding as between home and school has been due, in part, to the very scale upon which our educational processes have been carried on. Definite steps, also on a large scale, are being taken to overcome this, but every social worker who enters a home often and also knows the school to which its children are sent should be striving to make the home more helpful to the school.

SUMMARY OF THIS CHAPTER

1. The teacher who is the best educator, who is able to individualize his pupils and adapt his teaching to their needs and capabilities, is the best social witness.

2. The failings of teachers as social witnesses are traceable to those school conditions which make any individualization of their pupils impossible, and to their tendency to think that whatever social adjustment meets school needs, even temporarily, must be the right one.

3. The social evidence of teachers may be classified under evidence about (1) grade, (2) scholarship, (3) attendance, (4) behavior, (5) physical condition, (6) mental condition, (7) home care, (8) results of social treatment.

4. Grade means little except in relation to other facts, such as age of child when first entered at school, the family removals from city to city, school absences due to sickness, child's knowledge of the English language, etc.

5. A general scholarship mark is not so significant as are marks showing relative standing in different studies, and these again are not so significant as the teacher's own observations of the child's mental reactions.

6. Behavior covers something more than can be shown by a conduct mark. We must learn to seek for the description of the child's "acts, motives, desires, tendencies."

7. Certain individual variations in children that are due to physical or nervous disturbance are evident only to one who has them under observation continuously. Teachers are in a better position to give this evidence than anyone else, unless some members of the child's family happen to be good observers.

8. School evidence must play an important part in the discovery and segregation of defectives.

9. Teachers who have never seen the homes of their pupils are able nevertheless to give excellent witness as to the signs of good home nurture and those of home neglect.

10. As a measure of the results of social treatment in the home, a teacher's testimony taken at the beginning of treatment and at intervals later would have definite value.

11. As with medical sources, careful social reporting to School Sources by case work agencies and brief supplementary reporting on new developments later, strengthens co-operative relations.

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CHAPTER XII

EMPLOYERS AND OTHER WORK SOURCES

VERY period of the world's history is a period of transition,

of course, yet the institutions with which the social worker

has to deal seem to be changing at a far more rapid rate in our own day than in any other. Developments that have been continuous but hidden are now at last bearing visible fruit. In the hospital, the school, and the workshop reorganizations are in process that should soon make the doctor, the teacher, and the Employer more effective agents of social advance and better witnesses in the gathering of social evidence than they have ever been. The Employer differs from the teacher and the doctor, however, in that he is farther removed in daily habit from socialized action, and is often controlled by quite another set of motives. Even when, as sometimes happens, his motives are completely social, this fact is not easily recognized, because he is hampered by imperfect forms of industrial organization. By the earlier kinds of social work, Employers were used habitually as a favorite "reference" to vouch for clients in a general way as worthy or unworthy, industrious or lazy, sober or drunken. Like most things that we have always done, our regular practice of consulting with these industrial sources has become perfunctory. The case illustrations at hand show even less constructive planning on the industrial side than on the health and educational sides. There are probably other reasons for this than that the social agencies have been doing an old thing in an old way. Changes from small industrial plants to large ones, with the corresponding multiplication of middlemen, and the almost complete failure to individualize the laborer in most of our wholesale processes, have made it increasingly difficult to get the information that may be had about his work, and the information that may be had is less revealing.

There are signs from many quarters that the handling of labor as though it were scrap iron is soon to end, and that the workshop

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