ABSTRACT
The term continuum, as employed in social work education, was invented, not discovered. It did not evolve out of efforts to describe a practice or condition. It was borrowed as a concept thought useful to fulfill a specific function, and to promote a particular scheme for restructuring social work education. The term entered our literature in the late 1950s; achieved a level of conceptual significance in the 1959 Werner Boehm study of social work education; and achieved a kind of immortality when used as a subtopic heading in the essay on “Education for Social Work” in the Encyclopedia of Social Work, authored by Boehm in 1971. Some decades back, Ralph Carr Fletcher sought to learn how differences in undergraduate preparation related to the achievements of masters students in schools of social work. He concluded that students whose undergraduate majors were in the humanities did as well or better than those who had majored in the social and behavioral sciences.
