Education or Training? Power Struggles for the Heart of a Profession

Abstract

Education or training or both? How should the student’s learning experience be structured to produce a practitioner of quality, one who will do justice to the interests of both employers and ‘clients’? How does social work reconcile the irreconcilable? These are perennial questions lying at the centre of the power struggle for the heart of the profession and its educational mandate. They also indicate the contradictory expectations placed upon social workers. Because there is a power struggle, any answer which is produced will be contested in the fullness of time. Compromise resolutions, which lack the consent of all participants, fail to incorporate their concerns, and cannot dissolve contradictory tensions, will prove inadequate.