The education of a clinical social worker: Finding a place for the humanities

The values of our professionalized culture have encouraged the defining of social work as an academic discipline. As social work has then taken its place, academically, within the social sciences, a whole way of knowing and being in the world associated with the humanities is being left out of the higher education for clinical social workers. The thesis of this essay is that both experience and intellectual concerns suggest some disciplined study of the historical, theoretical, and metaphorical ways of knowing linked with the humanities could be an important part of the higher education for the would-be clinician.