The School Counselor as Institutional Agent.

Abstract

M ost school counselors have undering program with some additional facts, gone the process of learning techniques techniques, and interactional experi for working with students on schoolenees. This fact is supported by the related problems. If they have gone findings of a recent study (Kehas & through the usual graduate program, Morris 1971) which indicate that coun they have been exposed to procedures selors perceive of themselves as part of for the establishment of guidance prothe instructional apparatus of the grams, administration and interpretaschool (teachers in offices, so to speak), tion of a variety of standardized tests The counselor education program and the evaluation of interview methdoes not create a new professional ods. In some cases where younger exisidentity; it merely overlays some spe tential professors are members of the cialized techniques on a more basic staff, counselors may have been encourteacher identity. However, the faculty aged to get in touch with their personal of counselor education programs oper feelings through confrontation groups ate as if they were creating members of and confronting sessions with a profesa new professional group. Their model sor. has continued to be the independent The counselor education format has private clinician whose focus is a prob remained relatively stable for the past lem voluntarily presented by an indi 25 years; the rigid requirement has vidual. Counseling courses have tended been that every candidate for the proto assume the freedom of the client to gram have one or two years experience make his own choices and decisions, in the classroom, despite the arguments But as Aubrey (1969) has perceptively which some of us have raised against it pointed out, Many psychotherapeutic (Stewart & Warnath 1965). The typical models [of counseling] are at odds or counselor has already attained a proeven totally incongruent with educa fessional status within the educational tional objectives [p. 277]. system and, with at least five or six Since the psychotherapeutic models years of indoctrination, espoused the are central to counselor education pro middle-class values and perspectives of