Class or Course Focused on Social Work, Essay Example

Social work is itself a very broad category, encompassing many distinct disciplines: psychology, medicine, public health, physical therapy, education, law, law enforcement, statistics, personnel management, biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and home economics are obvious examples. Thus anyone who has obtained or is obtaining a two- or four-year college degree has taken at least one course that could at least qualify as relating to social work. However, at the introductory level perhaps only law enforcement is founded on the one quality that really defines social work: personal intervention.

It is probably impossible to be anything but a social worker in name if the role of intervention is lacking or minimized. Social workers are not mere field observers and collectors of facts and statistics, although they do a great deal of that. At both the entry- and top-level, social workers are by necessity (and, one hopes, personal preference) actively involved in the lives of those with whom they interact. Unless they have chosen a career path that aims for professional management at the organizational level, their individual responsibility is to put their own observations and the observations of others to direct use. In short, a social worker has a license to intervene.

Intervention is the reason students who think they might be interested in social work and those who think they are not interested in it would profit by taking at least an introductory course in the subject. To see why, consider the wide scope that social work covers, and the wide variety of students a college campus attracts. Those with a mathematical bent may find that the role of statistics in social work awakens a preference for applied mathematics, as opposed to the theoretical side. Extending this same principle to other disciplines may perform the same service — attracting those with an interest in and talent for directly applying their professional skills in a face-to-face setting.

Intervention and instruction are two names for the same thing: leadership. My argument ultimately is about fostering leadership by revealing to students the opportunities for exercising it in practical ways that benefit society and those who seek to improve it. It may be true that the final classifier of a college degree is the level of personal leadership those possessing a degree will necessarily have to exercise when they seek employment in the field of study their degree represents.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to speculate on the possibility of colleges and universities emphasizing the role of leadership in their curriculum by offering a series of courses, and perhaps even a degree, specifically in practical leadership as an art in and of itself. It’s true that under various names such courses and degrees are already offered, but still it would be revealing to what extent the curriculum for a degree in Leadership would parallel, perhaps even replicate, the coursework for a degree in Social Work. If so, then a comprehensive but introductory course in social work could be given a make-over with a new title: Personal and Professional Leadership.

One benefit to this approach would be that a well-attended basic course of this kind would inevitably turn some would-be social workers away to other areas of interest before they invested too much time and money in a subject they actually have little aptitude for. Not everyone has the talent or interest in the daily exercise of personal leadership, of daily intervention in the lives of others. That’s a perfectly valid attitude to have, and the livelihoods that don’t necessarily require constant proactive personal interaction is a respectable one. (Its list could start with A, for Art.)  The sooner well-intended students learn their own personal lesson in this regard, the better for themselves and everyone else — in other words, the better for society. Leadership isn’t for everyone.