Too often to be a coincidence, in my experience, individuals who have failed to achieve social mastery in their own environment want to become social workers and improve the environment of others. It is a curious and significant fact that the field of professional social work, in which many of the movements for social reform have originated, requires its workers to have a college education and two or three years’ post-graduate schooling, but does not require them to possess the personality traits or emotional balance necessary for success in normal life. I have discouraged hundreds of ambitions to do social work because they represented the individual’s escape from the necessity of improving himself
