Page 8 - DEDU502_GUIDANCE_AND_COUNSELING_ENGLISH

Guidance and Counseling

Notes needed it. Needless to mention, too often informal advice given without a clear understanding of
the problem involved was harmful and misleading to the individual. With the passage of time,
revolutionary and evolutionary changes have taken place in all walks, of life. The variety of jobs,
high aspirations of the people and vocational specialisation have made the work of guidance very
difficult. The head of the family or the leader of local community with the limited knowledge of
changed conditions such as globalisation, liberalisation and consumerism is not capable of providing
guidance to the youth of today.
In the last two decades, guidance movement has spread like a wild-fire through out the world and
generated a great amount of enthusiasm and zeal among parents, teachers and social workers who
have devoted time to explore its feasibility and the utility for general population including school
going adolescents. All are convinced that proper provision of guidance services should be made for
children at different age levels for the harmonious development of their personalities in the larger
interest of the society and the individual.
What does guidance precisely mean ? Let us first see what it does not mean. Lester.D. Crow and
Alice Crow (1962) in “An Introduction to Guidance”, have aptly stated that “Guidance is not giving
directions. It is not the imposition of one person’s point of view upon another person. It is not
making decisions for an individual, which he should make for himself. It is not carrying the burdens
of another life”. If guidance is not all these, then what is it really ?
To quote them again: “Guidance is an assistance made available by personally qualified and
adequately trained men or women to an individual of any age to help them manage their own life
activities, develop their own points of view, make their own decisions, and carry out their own
burden”.
Ordinary Meaning
Guidance is help, assistance, and suggestions for progress and showing the way. In that sense
guidance is a life long process. Man needs guidance throughout his life. He needs it even from his
infancy. When a child is born, the world for him is big, buzzing, blooming confusion and he knows
nothing. He learns everything from the society. From the mother, he learns how to stand on his feet,
from the father, he learns to walk and from the teacher, he learns to seek knowledge and education,
all learning takes place through guidance. The society guides the individual to learn, to adjust
oneself to the physical and social environment. To sum up we may say that guidance is a personal
help rendered by the society to the individual so as to enable him to adjust to the physical and social
environment and to solve the problems of life.

Specific Meaning
Guidance in India, is comparatively a new field within the larger and more inclusive field of education
and is used as a technical term as a specific meaning. It covers the whole spectrum of education,
which starts from the birth of the child and continues till his death. This is a wide meaning of the
term, which includes all types of education such as formal, non-formal, informal and vocational etc.,
which aims to adjust the individual in his environment in an effective way. There are usually three
connotations attached to the word guidance :
1. Guidance as a Specialised Service whose primary concern is with the individual and to help
them to solve their problems and take appropriate decisions in their choice-points;
2. Guidance as a General Service and is considered to be synonymous with education and
educational processes; and
3. Guidance as a Sub-Process of education in which developmental needs of the learners are
considered the basic points.
Now let us look at some selected definitions of the term guidance in a bid to understand its conceptual
and operational form :

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