| Summary: | "These cases are presented with two entirely distinct, although not divergent, aims. One of these is the gradual creation of a teaching literature for social work. Just as law, medicine, business administration, logic, and even ethics, can best be taught by the case-method, so social work, which often cuts across all these other fields, can best be transmitted to prospective workers through study of cases. The presentation of social case-histories involves problems different from those of legal cases, a difference in which inhere both a strength and a weakness. In legal cases there is an ultimate decision before a supreme judicial body. In social work authoritative procedure and technique have still to be worked out, and, what is more important, there never issues a final decision as to who is right and who is wrong. The second aim in the presentation of these cases is to demonstrate the possibilities of using orphanages for special cases, rather than utilizing such institutions only for the easy and 'normal' problem of child dependency. Such a practice is exactly opposite to that followed so religiously by all such institutions up to a decade ago and still lingering in many places"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
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