| Social work practice persists by virtue of a crucial alternative function: it is one of the culture’s practices of romanticism, glorifying national values in its insistence on individual initiative and responsibility through its services and providing easy status positions for America’s mediocracy. The field is not held accountable to effective social services nor even the provision of intelligent, responsive, productive and capable practitioners and intellectuals. Rather, social work performs civic sacraments—baptisms of the heroic individual will—in affirming the romantic ideals that are cherished pillars of America’s political and social choices. |