The courses most commonly “required” for all students in the schools are those treating the social sciences. What do these offer to the incipient social worker? The courses in sociology--especially those which thirteen of the schools offer in the history of certain institutions or in race comparisons--give perspective. They show institutions changing in form and function. They show ideas of right changing as the institutions change, temporary institutions conditioning our lives even in the matters a layman supposes instinctive. They force a student to look outside the setting of custom and creed into which, like every other man, he has been born. They show him the provincialism of sweeping judgments pronounced on the basis of sectional, sectarian or class standards. They teach him in a professional capacity (if in no other) to recognize varieties of good. Yet all the while they are making possible a simpler and more objectified conception of individuality than it is easy for the uninstructed to entertain. We look with something very like amusement on the animistic and anthropomorphic views of natural phenomena entertained by primitive men and yet we are only just beginning to realize that the subjective interpretations and moral judgments with which we have so long been satisfied in respect to humanity are equally arbitrary and deductive and that man also is, up to a certain point a natural phenomenon to be inductively considered. In such perspective praise and blame become to many issues irrelevant and we begin soberly to reckon the possibilities of education in the compass of individual lifetimes. Psychology, after sociology the science most frequently taught in the schools, pushes further the process sociology began. It shows that our most intimate convictions are not axiomatic. It shows the thought that is our very selves to be half the creation of others, and makes the question of individual blameworthiness a merely practical one of what forces are to be reckoned with in a given situation. The third of the general sciences taught is statistics, the language of collective fact. By discovering norms it shows danger lines. It tells what food and what air and what income are necessary to support life in an average individual and what degree of development is usual in a child of a given age and what degree of intelligence suffices to keep people out of trouble without the protection of a guardian. It gives the charitably inclined hard facts with which to face the indifferent and firm ground to stand on in demanding reform. At first sight it looks like a means to intolerable regimentation but rightly used it is a charter of freedom. Given a knowledge of the margin of safety we can make a concerted attack on substandard conditions while allowing indefinite variation above the danger line and the mere nonconformist need not be dreaded or attacked for simple nonconformity.