Chapter 25
GUIDANCE
The
Chapter at a Glance
What is Guidance?
The purpose of guidance.
The phases of guidance.
Fundamental rules of guidance.
The
history of the human race reveals that mankind has always felt the need for
some sort of guidance, especially for its young ones. This need, however, has
become more intense, more pressing and more precise in contemporary times owing
mainly to the growing complexity of the modes of living and other complications
associated with it. Parents and teachers, therefore, are now becoming growingly
alive to the need for adequate guidance for their children. Such awareness is
perhaps unprecedented in human history.
What is Guidance?
For an effective
survival in the contemporary world we do need guidance for ourselves and for
our children. Of this there can be no doubt. But we must be precise about what we
exactly mean by guidance.
Definition
of Guidance
Perhaps
the best definition of guidance is that offered by Jones*. It runs as follows:-
“Guidance
involves personal help given by someone; it is designed to assist a person to
decide where he wants to go, what he wants to do, or how he can best accomplish
his purpose; it assists him to solve problems that arise in his life.”
This
authoritative definition brings out clearly the salient features of guidance.
It points out that guidance is neither dictation nor direction. It is rather
friendly advice and personal help offered by a competent individual, known as
the guide or guidance expert, to one who is in need of such assistance, the guide to understand his problems
and to overcome his hurdles. Lack of guidance is liable to lead an individual
to inadequate thought and behavior, wrong decisions and to maladjustments.
Guidance is Education
We
have seen in the preceding chapters on Mental Health and Hygiene that the aim
of mental hygiene is the prevention and treatment of maladjustments. Guidance
also aims at precisely the same objective. It is, in fact, one of the
specialized techniques for realizing the aims and objects of mental hygiene.
From this point of view, guidance is a tool or a handmaid of mental hygiene.
A Significantly Educational Process
We
have also realized that the aims and purposes of mental hygiene and those of
educational are almost identical. Both aim at turning children into efficient,
adjusted and healthy citizens. Now since guidance furthers the purpose of
mental hygiene and since mental hygiene and education are identical it follows
that guidance, too, is a significant educational process.
Guidance is Education Itself
Guidance
aims at educating the individual for understanding himself, unfolding his
potentialities to their maximum so that he may eventually prove himself to be
an adjusted and pragmatic member of the community. Guidance, therefore, is a
significant educational procedure. It is, in short, education itself.
The Purpose of Guidance
Guidance
is a very comprehensive concept. Its object is to encourage the dull and the
backward child, to normalize the neurotic, to socialize the aggressive and to
reclaim the antisocial and the delinquent. In addition to such a specialized
service a program of guidance assists the average and the normal children in
overcoming their everyday problems of academic and social adjustment.
Specifically
speaking the main purposes of an adequate guidance program can be grouped under
the following major categories: —
(1)
The Psycho-physical purpose.
(2)
The Educational purpose.
(3)
The Vocational purpose.
(4) The
Recreational purpose.
(5)
The Social purpose.
The Psycho-Physical Purpose
An
adequate guidance program aims at improving the psychological and physical
health and efficiency of the individual.
It enables him to overcome his defects, deficiencies,
handicaps, disabilities, etc., both mental as well as physical.
A
properly guided child has better possibilities of developing into a mentally
and physically healthy adult. On the other hand, a child who is denied such
guidance is exposed to the risk of developing a number of mental and physical
diseases and inadequacies.
The Educational Purpose
Guidance
enables the learner to understand his abilities and to exploit them to their
maximum in scholastic pursuits. It thus minimizes the chances of educational
failures, wastages and frustrations which, without guidance, may disturb or
even wreck a child's life.
The Vocational Purpose
Guidance
offers valuable help to the individual in understanding his vocational
aptitudes and abilities. It aids him to decide about the adoption of a
particular profession that is most suited to his individual requirements.
Guidance thus increases an individual's chances for vocational and professional
efficiency and adjustment.
The Recreational Purpose
Guidance
highlights the significance of various healthy recreations and their
suitability for various types of individuals.
Participation
in those adequate and healthy recreations which are most suited to one's taste
and temperament increases one's health and efficiency very considerably.
Guidance thus decreases the possibilities of bad health and inefficiency consequent
upon lack of, indifference towards, or inadequate, recreation and enjoyment.
The Social Purpose
By
fulfilling the various purposes enumerated above, a guidance program furthers
the health and efficiency of the entire society. After all, the health and
well-being of the society is dependent, in the last analysis, upon the health
and well-being of the individuals who comprise it. Guidance, thus, is indispensable
for a healthy, efficient and economical social order.
The Phases of Guidance
One can
better appreciate the nature of guidance if one analyzes its various aspects or
phases. The three major phases of guidance are as follows:—
(1)
The Counseling phase.
(2)
The Mathematical phase
(3)
The Demonstrative phase.
The Counseling Phase
Counseling
means giving advice. This is the oldest guidance practice. Since life began
parents, teachers and elders have considered it their foremost duty to counsel
the younger ones on various aspects of life.
The
modern differs from the ancient form of counseling in that it is not directive,
authoritarian and rigid as the old system of counseling used to be.
Contemporary counseling simply aims at pointing out to the child the
possibilities of success and failure in a given field of life. It leaves the
matter of choice and decision to the child's own discretion. Modern scientific
guidance is mostly non directive. It merely offers friendly advice to those who
need it.
Guidance
has its mathematical side as well. Modern guidance makes quantitative
measurements of abilities, surveys of probabilities, etc. in order to be able
to offer better and more precise advice to the guides. Measurements also enable
the guidance experts to make predictions about human behavior.
The
mathematical aspect of guidance has been mainly responsible for the element of
accuracy in its procedures. This element is a unique characteristic of modem guidance.
The Demonstrative Phase
The
ancient systems of guidance relied mostly on sermons, exhortations, oral
advice, force, authority, etc. Modern guidance, on the contrary, emphasizes
the need for practical demonstrations and observations for and against the
good or bad course of thought and behavior suggested to the guidee.
Demonstrative
guidance has proved immensely useful in the field of education. Excursion
education, for instance, which provides the students frequent opportunities to
make study trips, educational tours, etc., has proved a very helpful demonstrative
technique for teaching many a school subject. Similarly, vocational trips to
various industries and professions demonstrating the general pattern of life in
these fields enables innumerable children to understand the suitability of a
particular professional career for themselves.
Fundamental Rules of Guidance
No
hard and fast guidance rules can be laid down for parents and teachers. There
are no Ten Commandments to an effective system of home and school guidance.
Much depends upon the wisdom and maturity of those who embark upon the task of
guiding children.
Some Common-Sense Rules
Some common-sense
rules, however, could be relied upon by parents and teachers in their efforts
to guide the children in their care. Following question was asked from 1,120
American School teachers:
"Do
you accept the thesis that the schools, with the co-operation of parents,
should attempt to guide pupils toward what seem to be the best educational and
vocational careers for them? If not, why
not; if so, with what reservations, if any?"
1,104
teachers answered "Yes" while only 16 answered "No". Their
answers and reservations constitute some of the most helpful common-sense rules
for administering guidance. Some of these answers are as follows:—
(1) Guidance
should be rational advice based on factual information.
(2) Guidance
should not be compulsion, force, domination, and cut and dried planning,
regimentation, prescription; neither should it be dictatorial or arbitrary.
(3) Neither
teachers nor parents should force children to follow an unwanted career.
(4) An
efficient and comprehensive guidance organization should be provided for testing and interviewing
each child and for evaluating all data
about each child.
(5) School
guidance should avoid, as far as possible, conflict with home guidance.
Parental Guidance
(6) While
parents naturally have their children's interests at heart and try to give them
sincere advice, they are prone to error because of the following factors:—
(a) The awareness of the child's
aptitudes and capacities, and the implications of these
facts,
are apt to be dulled by sentiment.
(b) Their lack of knowledge of a very
complex occupational world makes it difficult for them
to
give the child an adequate picture of career possibilities.
(c) Their eagerness to obtain
information about both the child and careers in general
leads
them to accept statements that are based on mere hearsay and that, therefore,
tend
to be scant, unreliable or biased.
(7) Parent
guidance is as necessary as pupil guidance.
(8) Guidance
should be done by trained guidance counselors. Guidance by well-intentioned, but untrained, people may do more harm than good.
(9) Guidance
should not take the sole responsibility for making people successful or happy
or good. It is but one of the agencies helping people to help themselves to
achieve their ends.
(10) Guidance should be broadly conceived. Ideally, a
child's vocational interests and choices should arise out of attitudes and
experiences developed through adequate educational guid-ance during the whole
of his school career.
(11) The
composite picture of the pupil as constructed by parents and teachers is probably the most accurate
obtainable. Hence, close cooperation
between teacher and parent is necessary in any guidance program.
The Social Implication
(12) The social implication of guidance is that
each individual should be
engaged in that type of occupation which he can successfully pursue and in
which he can render his maximum contribution to society and to his fellow men.
(13) Guidance
workers should remember that since it is the child who must live with his
choice, it should be the child who makes the choice of a career whether
educational or vocational. The guidance worker's job is to help the child make
that choice as intelligently and as
wisely as possible.
(14) Guidance
should not mean coddling the student. However, for some students, it should provide more suitable programs. Some of these will be harder, some
easier, than the average. The goal
should be an individually tailored program for every child.
(15) Guidance,
properly functioning, should eliminate to very great extent maladjustments of
individuals to school life.
(16) The theory that every teacher should be a guidance
teacher is based on the false belief that every teacher can be a guidance
teacher. Many teachers do not have the type of personality, the training, or
the interest required for this work.
The Guidance Workers
(17) Guidance
workers should be practical people of the widest culture and interests.
(18) Guidance
workers should keep a careful record of the help- given pupils. Hence, a complete system of personal records is a
necessity for every counselor.
(19) Vocational
tendencies are latent in many cases until adolescence is well over. Hence it is necessary that much guidance be
given late in the high school period.
(20) It is
idle to talk of guiding pupils towards the courses for which they are best
fitted unless the schools provide such courses.
These
common sense rules can prove helpful for teachers and parents in guiding the
children along the right lines.
