_Ignorance_, of course, is permanent. If we were not ignorant we should never progress. Ignorance therefore does not necessarily mean culpable ignorance, but still it may be the keynote to the trouble in which any of us finds himself. Consider industrial ignorance, ignorance of where best to turn one's forces. It would be impossible to say that any of us is free from that. Are we perfectly sure that we have found the place where the Lord intended us to work? This lack may not be such as to bring us into trouble. It may not force us to seek social aid. Yet the lack of a clear idea about where we ought to be working, how we can earn the most money, do the most good, and be happiest--that is a deficiency that none of us is free from. _Industrial ignorance_ has been the ultimate diagnosis in some of the cases that I have studied. The patient is an industrial misfit. He has not found his niche. Perhaps there is no niche existing for him. Some people seem to be made for another planet or another century. Evidently, then, conception of an industrial misfit is wide, perhaps vague. Yet it often dominates the economic situation. Your patient perhaps cannot earn his living because he is working with only about one quarter of his powers, and that the least useful quarter. That with which he is trying to earn his living may be a mere superficiality. Half the women that I know in industry are working with a wholly superficial part of themselves, unconnected with any of their deepest interests. That is less true of social workers than of any other body of women. They often can put the best of themselves into their work. But many women in industry, in business, hate it. They may be earning enough, but are unhappy and unsatisfied, because the powers with which they were meant to labor for the service of their kind are not being used at all. _Medical ignorance_: A quarter, perhaps, of our task as social workers, is medical instruction, the breaking-up of medical ignorance. Most well-trained physicians of the present day do not believe that many diseases can be cured by medicine or by surgery. We do not have great confidence in chemical, physical, or electrical therapeutics. We believe that when sick people are helped by a medical man or a social worker it is because they have learned something of what we call _how to live_, a large term which we usually limit to mean how to look after their physical machine.