Roger,
It occurred to me that each time this subject comes up, you mention that you
have studied Marxist theory and are explaining it to me and that you would
accept my explanation of the adoption field without quibbling if I were to
explain it to you. So I wanted to explain why these are not parallel
examples. I do think that my social work education in graduate school,
however, does say something about the kind of thinking that I resist. In
1959, if you attended social work school and specialized in casework, you
took certain coursework and had a particular kind of interaction with your
advisor and your field work supervisor which were supposed to help you
become the kind of person who could help individuals change their attitudes
and behavior to function more comfortably and effectively in the world.
There were a lot of different courses, but the most important for your
future work were classes in Freudian theory and casework. Even more
important, were the interactions between you and your advisor and your field
work supervisor. Two to three days each week were spent at a social agency
where clients were assigned to you and your work with these clients was
closely supervised by your supervisor. These personal interactions aimed to
change your attitudes, feelings, and behavior so that you would be as
helpful as possible to your clients. So one was meant to emerge from
graduate school equipped to be an effective agent of change, to then find
work in a social agency or psychiatric clinic where one would see individual
clients who had come to the facility for assistance. Some social work
students didn't complete the course of study. They were, "counseled out"
because for one reason or another, they could not adapt to the regimine.
But if you managed to get that Master's degree, you left graduate school
with a particular view of the world and of human beings. Basically, you
interpreted all human events through a Freudian framework. In retrospect, I
can attest that much of what I learned about people and how they function
from that curriculum, seems to be true. But even though the school was
teaching students to deal with people who were having problems in society,
and even though there were specializations in Group Work and Community
Organization along with Casework, there were no courses dealing with social
class, social structures or how economic arrangements influenced the clients
whom we encountered. I came to that school having already formed a political
consciousness. After all, I'd grown up in New York City, the child of
working class parents who'd voted for Henry Wallace in 1948. I'd naively
assumed that anyone attending a school of social work would at least have
liberal political views. That wasn't true. Some of the students were
children of auto manufactduring executives. This was Michigan. The politics
of the school faculty varied. One of my teachers was Wilbur Cohen, the
person who wrote the Social Security Act of 1935. Another was his wife. But
I remember my advisor saying to me that of course, if I planned to work
fulltime as a social worker, I should not plan to marry and have children.
I'm telling you all of this because there is so much that seems correct to
me in what I read about and hear about Marxist theory. However, it is just
another way of viewing human beings and how they function. In the same way
that I can see what is positive in Freudian theory and yet understand that
it doesn't explain everything, I can see all of the positive points in
Marxist theory, but I could never become a loyalist. Additionally, as a
social worker, I first worked with mental patients who'd been released from
stae hospitals. Next, I worked with clients of an agency for the blind. And
because, as a legally blind person, getting a job in social work was so
difficult, I ended up, purely by chance, with a private practise in adoption
work as an unforeseen result of adopting a Vietnamese war orphan. It wasn't
what I'd chosen. I'd originally wanted to do counseling with people, but my
blindness was a barrier to that. Had I been able to get work with an agency,
I would have had a much more secure financial situation than I do now, or at
least, I think I would have. But the adoption work was a true learning
experience. I learned a lot about certain other countries, had some unusual
clients, and learned to understand something about how lawyers really
function.
Miriam
