ABSTRACT
The promise of social work education has been unfulfilled primarily because of the profession's inability to reconcile the tension between empirical methods and normative theory, exacerbated by lack of internal coherence within a dynamic society. In the United States social work emerged as an identifiable profession in the late nineteenth century, a period in which competing visions of human perfection proliferated. The nation's social casework agencies organized the National Conference of Charity and Corrections in 1874 in order to attend to "the more practical organizational issues" that they faced. The Conference had drifted from the orbit of the professional associations of the day, which were affiliated with university graduate research programs, and came under the influence of agencies. Despite the unprecedented opportunities of the Progressive Era, educators were unable to develop a unified educational strategy that would position the newborn profession to exploit these opportunities.
