Reading a somewhat tedious
article about whether social work killed civil society in
National Review. I came across an interesting nugget I'd share with you. It's the concept of the "success sequence."
The “success sequence” is a social-science concept that has seen various expressions spanning several decades, but its essential claim is thus: If an individual finishes high school, gets a job, and gets married before having children, he is highly unlikely to live in poverty.
This basic schema has been confirmed by subsequent research, though it’s not without its dissenters, who charge it to be overly reductive and a means of blaming the poor for their poverty.
I'm not young, but what the success sequence asks is only what our parents expected of us when we were growing up. It works too, almost all the time. The article ends with the conclusion of the book being reviewed -
Who Killed Civil Society by Howard Husock
.
What would . . . renaissance mean for the multibillion-dollar social service state? That would entail returning social work to its roots of friendly visiting: exposing households to the idea that life choices improve life chances, rather than compensating them with services for being victims of an unjust social structure.
