=New Training for Social Service.=--Two movements have resulted from
the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet
recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense
influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon
the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements
are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average
normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements
for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social
treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped
life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose
in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill
mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the
majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease,
poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of
rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it
speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both
higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen
ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture
and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction
led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in
universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary
schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply,
housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social
engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment.
It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the
philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and
standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two
elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that
to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the
majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly
leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers,
doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for
the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have
a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life,
the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the
wayward, and the undeveloped--these, which have been their special
tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their
main business in the more complex situations of modern life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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