Thus may courses in social science give to many a raw recruit of social work grounds for acting with the tolerance, the respect for individuals, the single and unaccusing eye on present and future possibilities which their elders and maybe betters had (when they had them at all) as the rare and not to be commanded gifts of sheer humanity and wisdom. Here is the contribution of science to social work which touches its vital center, refines the very impulse that animates it, as it animated its predecessors and keeps it true to form among the distractions of technical formality. No study can produce imagination, sympathy, generosity or good taste any more than it can give a student a better brain, but what it can do is to give to persons of only average perspicacity and humanity the understanding to act with some degree of intelligence and consideration where the untrained average person would make cruel and disastrous blunders. The tentative definition of social work which we sought to test and add to by the testimony of conference and school curricula has gained no fresh terms but it has gained in significance and, taken together with all its implications, makes of social work something thoroughly definitive and characteristic. But the definition was wanted for practical purposes and before dropping the subject it will be necessary to inquire whether it can in any degree serve them. FOOTNOTES: [55] For a list of schools see the Appendix. The list comprises the membership of the “Association of Training Schools for Professional Social Workers,” organized 1919. [56] All information in this chapter is from the school catalogues for the years 1920-21 or 1921-22 (the latest available when this study was begun) or from correspondence with the schools. [57] Social service “calls for a knowledge of the principles of social organization, the conditions which cause poverty and may lead to dependency, the social and psychological factors involved in the training of youth, the methods of promoting thrift and independence among the laboring classes, the many experiments which have been made in the field of social legislation and the relations between these various theories and activities.” [58] “The purpose of the School of Social Work is to give professional training in the art of adjusting personal relations. Social workers also have to do with food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention, but these are incidental to their main work of adjusting differences which arise in the relations between people, e.g., between school authorities and parents and parents and pupils, between family and community.” [59] Four schools which are integral parts of universities with many of the courses their students are expected to take organized as parts of other departments are not divided as are the independently organized schools and those whose college connection is not so involved. [60] For list see Appendix II, C. CHAPTER VI THE ANSWER TO ITS CRITICS