BOOK

Despite its lofty rhetoric that exalts human interdependence and international cooperation, social work in the United States has largely remained an America-centered profession. Social work education, too, has failed to make serious strides to learn or teach about the rest of the world. The Curriculum Policy Statement of the Council on Social Work Education includes no more than an innocuous and fleeting pronouncement about the interdependence of nations and the need for worldwide professional cooperation. Only a handful of programs offer even a single course on international social work. In most institutions library resources on international social welfare and social development are pitifully inadequate. The situation is no better with regard to financial support for foreign students to study social work in the U.S. or for U.S. students and faculty to study social work in other countries. Faculty exchange programs between U.S. schools of social work and educational institutions abroad are few and feeble. Fewer than 600 international students at the baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral levels were enrolled in U.S. social work educational programs last year out of a total that approached 50,000. Although data on American students studying social work in other nations do not exist, one can surmise their number is smaller still. Both U.S. students and faculty remain indifferent to learning foreign languages. No wonder that social work faculty and students in general have little consciousness and less involvement in international social work. This ignorance and insularity feed the unspoken but widespread notion that US social work offers a model of social work practice worth emulating by other nations.

The contributors to this volume include prominent social work education with a deep and abiding commitment to international collaboration in social work. They argue that many problems of the contemporary world can neither be analyzed intelligently nor combated effectively without a transnational perspective. They demonstrate, for example, that migration, structural unemployment, violence, hunger and refugee rehabilitation are international issues, that the challenge to help a growing elderly population is not confined to one country or continent, that the hopes, fears and dreams of children are a concern for all who care for the well being of humanity, that the problems of drugs, AIDS, child labor, ethnic discord, poverty and social exclusion must be addressed as global challenges.