In a real sense, guidance pervades all of education. It expresses the concern of the school for individualising the educational programme. This means that it is every teacher’s responsibility to understand the interests, abilities, and feelings of every child and to adapt the educational programme to meet those needs.
In another sense, guidance is a series of special services. These ii elude activities which make the school programme effective in meeting the needs of each child. Among these are plans for:
Important Function
1. Discovering the real needs and problems of students,
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2. Using information collected about students to adjust instruction to meet individual needs,
3. Developing among teachers a greater understanding of child growth and development,
4. Providing such specialised services as orientation, individual inventory, counselling, occupational information, group guidance, placement, follow-up of graduates and drop-outs,
5. Conducting research which evaluates the success of the programme.
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Although the guidance point of view touches every aspect of school activity, the fact should be stressed that education and guidance differ in purpose and process. Education, interpreted either as process or product, is an individual matter.
The child, adolescent, or adult himself must make the changes within himself which he recognises to be desirable.
The function of the teacher can be no more than to make available to the learner opportunities of value to him in his self- education.
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He needs to be stimulated to want to learn, to be helped to discover what things he should learn, and to be encouraged to progress satisfactorily in his learning.
The educational process takes place within the individual, and educational products are evidenced in his behaviour.
What then is the relation of guidance to education? Guidance constitutes those factors outside the individual that are made available to him in his search for self-development.
In its broadest connotation, guidance can be regarded as a form of education. In its more specific interpretation, it includes all those techniques of counselling and all those bodies of information that can help the individual help himself.
It should be remembered, also, that young people receive much informal guidance from their elders. Because of their close relationship with the growing child, parents and teachers exert a significant influence on his attitudes and behaviour.
This kind of guidance is constantly in action. Hence whatever kind of persons we want our young people to become, we ourselves must be. The parents who tell lies in the presence of the child cannot admonish the child to be truthful.
The teacher in charge of a study hall who engages in conversation with a fellow teacher does not dare ask pupils to refrain from talking so as not to annoy others who are studying.
It is imperative that all of us recognise that general concept of guidance and that we be ever on the alert to have our actions serve as worthy guides.
Identification of Basic Guidance Goals:
In an attempt to achieve a tenable point of view concerning the various aspects of the guidance concept, one difficulty encountered is that of clear terminology.
The expansion or modification of guidance functions has been accompanied by semantic changes that can be extremely confusing.
For example, certain pairs of terms, such as guidance and counselling, guidance worker and guidance counsellor, guidance services and personnel services, or guidance and personnel services, too often are used indiscriminately as identifying the same functional aspects of the guidance concept.
The terms pupil personnel, personnel work, pupil personnel worker and personnel services are finding their way into the literature of guidance. Apparently the term personnel work originated in industry to describe administrative activities aimed at better management-worker relations and improved utilisation of industrial manpower.
The term student personnel work came to be used on the college level to identify administrative management of student life.
Later, lower-school administrators employed the term pupil personnel in much the same way as it is used in industry and on the college level. Thus we may conclude:
Guidance is the outgrowth of a philosophy of education that every child in a school system should have an opportunity for full growth the development in order to achieve his greatest potential…
We consider the guidance function, therefore, as consisting of two integral phases, (1) the guidance concept of teaching, (2) pupil personnel services available to give assistance to the teacher, the school, and the pupils and parents to aid in the implementation of the educational programme.
An effective child-centred programme of education cannot be accomplished without both phases of guidance, each supplementing the other; neither can function effectively without the other.