What Is Social Case Work? An Introductory Description #222019

Howe's stone was cast — not like Laura's into a brook, but into shoreless waters upon which the circles continue to widen and widen. The story of what followed has been told many times, but not from the angle from which, as an introduction to the subject of case work, I now propose to view it. Helen Keller was six years and nine months old when Miss Sullivan came to Tuscumbia. Though her teacher did not keep a diary like Dr. Howe's, we have what for my present purpose serves even better. At almost weekly intervals during that first year Miss Sullivan wrote to a friend, the matron of Perkins Institution, giving her not so much the educational details of a task with which her correspondent was already ia miliar, but describing the new situations, many of them social, with which she found herself con fronted, and adding the frankest possible report Of her own mental processes in trying to meet these. 50 we have in the letters not only what happened but how it happened, and the teacher's own reactions as well as the pupil's.