PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES FOR SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION IN INDIA: SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

Abstract

India is very fortunate to have a good beginning of professional Social Work under the leadership of Sir Clifford Manshardt, the founder director of its first school of Social Work, now popularly known as Tata Institute of Social Sciences at Mumbai. This visionary personality enunciates that professional training in Social Work stands for soundness of essential principles of education, for flexibility of method and for a working relationship with the whole professional field that will give both perspective and depth to its educational program. While the school, as a graduate institution (at the time of inception) sought to maintain high academic standard, it also sought to be eminently practical, applying the best of modern social thought to the solution of the present day social problems. He believed that scholarly activities are not incompatible with simplicity and commonsense, and that the professional Social Worker is to develop his ability to give himself an intelligent, skillful and disinterested service to others. To be eminently practical, Manshardt propounded that the activities of a high grade school of Social Work should fall into three general fields: the Academic Curriculum encompassing adequate knowledge of human nature, appreciation of environmental background, an adequate philosophy and conception of normal human relations and knowledge of all other available sources of relief; practical work or Field Work and Social Research which is both scholarly and accurate while being eminently practical dealing with the everyday problems of social life (Manshardt,1985, 5).