I'm a social worker with a Masters, and 90% of my social work education was basically useless. In this field, you actually learn by doing, but you still have to go through 4 years for a Bachelors, 2 years for a Masters (1 if your Bachelors was in social work), and two year-long unpaid internships, all for the purpose of being able to do something that you could honestly do without any of that. It would be so much better to just have supervision requirements (e.g. you have to do your first X years under the supervision of somebody who has Y years of experience- we already have requirements like these for after people get their degrees, and to be clear "supervision" in this context is more like mentorship and it doesn't have to be done with someone who actually has hiring/firing power over you). But there's a reason that the educational requirements are in place even beyond all the things that most of us here would intuitively understand. I'm going to nerd out on social work history a little bit.
When it started, social work was two separate fields that were lumped together. On the one hand, you had organizations like the Charity Organization Society, and on the other you had settlement houses. Skipping over some history (and some genuinely pretty awful origins for both of those things), the COS's system developed into what we now call case management, and the settlement houses evolved into community organizing. The latter especially was really effective at helping communities organize for improved material conditions.
Then, at the turn of the 20th century, some random doctor did a study of social work and he was like "I dunno you guys, doesn't look like a profession to me". And ever since, social work has been scrambling to prove it is a profession by heightening all the many problems of social work at the expense of all of the good things it was doing. And this is ingrained DEEP- at my graduation, the head of my school gave a speech about this and basically ended with "well we really are a profession now so take THAT random doctor". This is how something like 90% of social workers became therapists, despite that not really having any historical roots in the profession- because therapists are easier to point to in order to say "see, we're a profession" and also it's easier for therapists to get paid.
I don't think it's a coincidence that professionalization involved shedding a lot of the more radical work the field was doing. And I mean, I love my therapist colleagues, they do really important work, but the fact that they basicaly ARE the profession now means the profession has lost any sort of focus on any level above the individual, no matter how much we talk about viewing the Person in the Environment or how many ecomaps we draw.
No problem. And I could go into some more detail if you want, this is something that pisses me off.
This is more broad, but for people who were interested in any of what I just said, I would recommend that people read From Poor Law to Welfare State by Walter Trattner and Regulating the Lives of Women by Mimi Abromowitz. They're about the history of social services in general more than social work, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The former is one of the seminal works in the field, the latter is basically "hey, what if we did that but we also talked about women and people of color beyond them being afterthoughts?" The Abromowitz book is also apparently a response to Regulating the Poor by Frances Fox Piven, and I haven't read that but apparently it's also good, if flawed.
Literally every job would be better with an apprenticeship program instead of a degree. You would start off making money right away and be competent and training your own apprentices in 4-5 years. Those coding bootcamps could actually be the first step in an apprenticeship where you get paid to learn and then get placed with a journeyman developer on a project steadily building skills and experience.
I see two issues with that approach, even though it would have a lot of benefits:
A lot of people aren't good teachers and aren't particularly interested in teaching. While there are plenty of people like that who are already professors, I think the problem would get quite a bit worse if teaching becomes the job of even more people (including many who never got into their field wanting to teach in any capacity).
Existing universities produce significant value through having research so closely linked to teaching, and though having multiple different disciplines all easily accessible to one another. Again, there are problems with this approach, but a pure apprenticeship model would run the risk of siloing students off the newest work and from adjacent disciplines that might be valuable or interesting.
A mix of university-style teaching and apprenticeships (or paid externships) would probably get the best from both worlds. I think some fields already do this, or at least something close to it.
Professionalization fucking sucks.
I'm a social worker with a Masters, and 90% of my social work education was basically useless. In this field, you actually learn by doing, but you still have to go through 4 years for a Bachelors, 2 years for a Masters (1 if your Bachelors was in social work), and two year-long unpaid internships, all for the purpose of being able to do something that you could honestly do without any of that. It would be so much better to just have supervision requirements (e.g. you have to do your first X years under the supervision of somebody who has Y years of experience- we already have requirements like these for after people get their degrees, and to be clear "supervision" in this context is more like mentorship and it doesn't have to be done with someone who actually has hiring/firing power over you). But there's a reason that the educational requirements are in place even beyond all the things that most of us here would intuitively understand. I'm going to nerd out on social work history a little bit.
When it started, social work was two separate fields that were lumped together. On the one hand, you had organizations like the Charity Organization Society, and on the other you had settlement houses. Skipping over some history (and some genuinely pretty awful origins for both of those things), the COS's system developed into what we now call case management, and the settlement houses evolved into community organizing. The latter especially was really effective at helping communities organize for improved material conditions.
Then, at the turn of the 20th century, some random doctor did a study of social work and he was like "I dunno you guys, doesn't look like a profession to me". And ever since, social work has been scrambling to prove it is a profession by heightening all the many problems of social work at the expense of all of the good things it was doing. And this is ingrained DEEP- at my graduation, the head of my school gave a speech about this and basically ended with "well we really are a profession now so take THAT random doctor". This is how something like 90% of social workers became therapists, despite that not really having any historical roots in the profession- because therapists are easier to point to in order to say "see, we're a profession" and also it's easier for therapists to get paid.
I don't think it's a coincidence that professionalization involved shedding a lot of the more radical work the field was doing. And I mean, I love my therapist colleagues, they do really important work, but the fact that they basicaly ARE the profession now means the profession has lost any sort of focus on any level above the individual, no matter how much we talk about viewing the Person in the Environment or how many ecomaps we draw.
deleted by creator
No problem. And I could go into some more detail if you want, this is something that pisses me off.
This is more broad, but for people who were interested in any of what I just said, I would recommend that people read From Poor Law to Welfare State by Walter Trattner and Regulating the Lives of Women by Mimi Abromowitz. They're about the history of social services in general more than social work, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The former is one of the seminal works in the field, the latter is basically "hey, what if we did that but we also talked about women and people of color beyond them being afterthoughts?" The Abromowitz book is also apparently a response to Regulating the Poor by Frances Fox Piven, and I haven't read that but apparently it's also good, if flawed.
Literally every job would be better with an apprenticeship program instead of a degree. You would start off making money right away and be competent and training your own apprentices in 4-5 years. Those coding bootcamps could actually be the first step in an apprenticeship where you get paid to learn and then get placed with a journeyman developer on a project steadily building skills and experience.
I see two issues with that approach, even though it would have a lot of benefits:
A mix of university-style teaching and apprenticeships (or paid externships) would probably get the best from both worlds. I think some fields already do this, or at least something close to it.