WORKERS LACK AIM, DECLARES SECRETARY

"Volunteer workers have become a problem in social service, not alone at the Phillips Brooks House, but also in Boston," said Miss Katherine Hardwick, Field Secretary of the Boston School of Social Work, in an interview yesterday.

Aimlessness is Chief Fault

"Workers are no more aimless in Harvard work than in Boston, except as undergraduates are less responsible. But they are all too aimless. It is a strange affliction of the volunteer. They all suffer from it to a greater or less degree, and are not wholly to blame. I blame the supervisors.

"Boston social workers are coming more and more to realize that the double standard for volunteer and paid workers must go. All societies are preparing a new set of principles. They are threefold: more careful choice of workers with a thorough explanation of their obligations, a wise placement of workers in tasks which interest them, and a better liaison between the two elements.

Many Minds Working on Problem

"It is interesting to note that the CRIMSON's editorial stand corresponds to this idea I have just expressed. I am particularly pleased that so many minds should tend toward this solution. All those precautions would seem to imply that the volunteer is totally to blame for his aimlessness. He is not.

"That seems to be illustrated in the Phillips Brooks House. The students have only so much enthusiasm. They enter the work with all too little guidance and are more often misplaced at first than well placed. Once they are in, they are too little supervised. They find themselves engaged in that which interests them not at all, anxious to do half a dozen other helpful things in which they are really interested.

Junior League Successful

"Both agents have been desultory. Under the recently proposed system neither would be. The Junior League is meeting with great success in applying the system. They are accepting the services of all volunteers, but giving them to understand what is expected of them. They are placing their girls carefully, shifting them to determine their bent. Then they weigh their abilities, sift out their best and most interesting workers, and turn failure to success."

Members of the staff of the Elizabeth Peabody House, in a second interview, described the use they make of volunteers.

"At the beginning of each year we acquaint the workers with the general field of our work at a round table dinner. These experts tell the amateurs what they are to expect. We have several such dinners later in the fall, smaller and less general in their description of the work.

Supervision Essential

Most of those people, once the bargain is made, the problem described, and the work begun, are satisfied to live up to their undertaking. Few of them can carry on unsupervised.

"We clear the path for them, also, by making many preliminary arrangements with our workers in the spring. Then when they come to us in the fall they are prepared.

"Whenever possible we refuse to take College Freshmen, for we consider that the are not yet oriented. It is unfair to expect them to know what they want. "In all work where other organizations send us workers we are much more ready to aid them when we sense an intelligent handling of work on their part. All these means, employed in Boston, should work equally well in the Phillips Brooks House."