The schools, all but four,[59] arrange their courses in departments varying in number from two to ten. Altogether seventeen different fields are indicated by the several schools and under them are variously grouped the forty subjects taught.[60] These very involved curricula dealing, as they do, in such staggering propositions as the nature of progress and the causes of poverty, and seeming in their explicit statements unanimous in nothing which might serve the cause of definition do give certain collective testimony. In the first place they are agreed that social work comprises a variety of separate callings demanding differential training. The differential training is not the result of specialization after receiving a common training. Most schools while requiring a certain amount of common background for all students recognize no general course and require every student to enroll in one or another department. Secondly, in making a great deal of elective work interchangeable among the special courses and requiring certain prerequisites for all courses alike they all recognize a close relation between the various branches of social work. Thirdly, they show that the work they prepare for is not “social” in the merely vague sense of having a public interest. It is social in the specific sense of dealing with people in their relations to other people. Its prerequisite is not physiology, the science of that part of man which can develop in isolation, but psychology, the science of intelligence which develops only in contact with other intelligences. We can see this in the contrast between the training given in a medical school and that given in a school for social workers. The former teaches a great deal about man’s physical make-up and its hazards but very little about his mental make-up: while the latter may teach enough of sanitary practice to understand a doctor’s directions, almost always teaches something of mental life and always a great deal about social settings and the available means of improving them. This “social” interest is constant throughout the schools. The courses in industry, for example, do not teach efficiency engineering or price fixing but personnel management and other matters presumably ministering directly to the well being of the workers. These schools do not equip for the advancement of any particular science. Philosophy and art of any sort enter them only as casual visitors. They teach in the name of no single creed and formulate no specific purpose. Despite their enormous array of topics their interest remains essentially personal.