One of the most important developments in the field of education during the past century has been the increased specialization in educational services.
Among the first specialties to emerge were the four large areas of teaching, counselling, administration, and supervision.
These characteristics and requirements have given a clear and definite professional status to the many educational specialities.
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Such specialisation has some disadvantages and dangers, but there can be no doubt that it has greatly increased the effectiveness of the entire educational system.
Although each of these areas has a definite responsibility for certain services and uses characteristic techniques and thus makes its own contribution to the overall programme of education, the lines separating one area of service from another are not entirely clear and distinct.
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The interrelation and overlapping in objectives and techniques may be seen by a brief discussion of the four large areas of service previously mentioned. Teaching is concerned with helping students to learn.
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Counselling deals with helping students to develop the ability to solve their own problems. Supervision is responsible for providing leadership in improving instruction.
Administration is concerned with the control, direction, and management of the school, that is, the provision of conditions favourable for learning.
Guidance and Counselling Differentiated:
Very few terms have been more loosely or inter-changeably used than the terms ‘guidance’ and ‘counselling’.
According to Tolbert, “Guidance… is the total programme or all the activities and services engaged in by an educational institution that are primarily aimed at assisting an individual to make and carry out adequate plans and to achieve satisfactory adjustment in all aspects of his daily life.
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Guidance is not teaching but it may be done by teachers. It is not separate from education but is an essential part of the total educational programme.
Guidance is a term which is broader than counselling and which includes counselling and as one of its services.”
Butler makes a logical separation of the counselling process discerned as having two phases called ‘adjustive’ and ‘distributive’.
In the adjustive phase, the emphasis is on the social, personal and emotional problems of the individual; in the distributive phase the focus is upon his educational, vocational and occupational problems.
According to Arbuckle, Butler’s distributive phase can be most aptly described as ‘guidance’ whilst the adjustive phase can be considered as the description of ‘counselling’.