The Regeneration of Guidance.

Abstract

|t is a clay, cold day, rainy and dark. model? Yes, I think that we have I sit here surrounded by volumes of allowed ourselves to be misdirected and reference material, restlessly attempting have become marginal men within the to identify what it is that I am feeling. school, separate and with unequal Somehow I'm afraid I've been status with regard to teachers and ad and I don't know whom to blame. I ministrators (Mosher & Sprinthall 1971, have looked for advice in the references p. 8). around me, sought authority and sugYou know, I really thought I had gestion, and tried to examine this windthis guidance business firmly in hand, shaken profession of school counseling. Now, suddenly, I've changed my course. It is not difficult to rake up our inI have come to that noble moment securities or to expose our myths. It is when past reference, advice, and au comfortable and even satisfying to thority must no longer speak for what blame, because through blame one reI see and what I feel. I have reached moves oneself from the problem. It is that priested moment when a breaking always the other guy, the way we have begins. It is time for a regeneration of been trained, that inadequate budget, counseling and guidance, the impossible counseling load, the rigid system, and that miserable ad ministration. All of this may be true; yet the nagging suspicion remains that as well as having been misled, I have First, our worn-out dichotomy of sep been part of the problem. Perhaps I aratism must change. It will begin to feel I've been had because I have been change when we realize that as coun supported in pursuing what I have selors our identification is with educa known was not possible; I have been supported in a role definition that has thrust me outside of education instead Marguerite R. Carroll is Assistant Pro al within it. Might it be that I feel I fessor and Co-Chairman, Division of have proselytized myself, sold out to Counseling and School Psychology, Fair _ _ ' _ . . . . , field University, Fairfield, Connecticut. the needs of the administration or the „7 . . . . . . . , . ,» This paper was originally presented at the press of the institution, or blindly let convention of the American Personnel and myself be duped by the mysterious Guidance Association in Chicago, March faith-healing light of the therapeutic 1972.