The Significance of College counseling

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Part of Panorama

Title: The Significance of College counseling
Creator: Sinco, Vicente G.
Language: English
Year: 1961
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Fulltext: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COLLEGE COUNSELING Dr. Vicente G. Sinco More than at any other time in our history education of fered in colleges and universi ties plays a very important and decisive role not only in the improvement of the indi vidual for his own sake but also, and especially, in the bet terment of the social and eco nomic conditions of our coun try. It is the broader effect of college education that gives it a distinct color and a new significance in this era of scientific revolution. Even such an advanced country as the United States of America, which for a long time had as sumed an attitude of self-sa tisfaction with its material wealth, productive indust ries, and nation-wide prospe rity, has become very greatly concerned with the education of its youth and the condition of its schools and colleges dur ing the last ten years or so in the face of the spectacular achievements of science and technology 'that have taken place in the Soviet Union and other countries in Europe. Such achievements are but the direct or indirect results of college and university edu cation. Those of us who have been following the movements and trends in the educational world are quite well aware of the general dissatisfaction of most people in America with the work of many of their edu cational institutions. The agi tation for changes in the edu cational programs of their col leges and universities has not been confined to a small group of scholars and scientists but has been participated widely by different elements of the nation, including business men, labor leaders, ministers of religion, social workers, professionals, and politicians. The general feeling is that col December 1961 23 lege education of different grades and varieties should be improved and should keep pace with the times. In addi tion, it is felt that such educa tion should be made more easily available to the great est number of the young peo ple and should adjusted to their different capacities and potentialities. This clamor for college edu- . cation, this demand for its im provement, is echoed in most parts of the world today. It is not just an expression of eagerness for diplomas and degrees. It is a thirst for knowledge that gives its pos sessor the ability and power to do and produce. It is the outcome of the realization that changes are not only constantly taking place but are taking place faster than what many of us know or by highly qualified scientists conjecture. Estimates have been made by highly qualified scientists and scholars that human knowledge, particularly in science and technology, has been doubling every ten to fifteen years; and in the so cial sciences and humanities the increase in knowledge, although not as fast as in the natural sciences, has likewise been markedly large within a space of twenty or thirty years. Consider, for instance, electronics, automation, the jet plane, antibiotics, nylon and other synthetic fibers, te levision, and other more re cent developments. They were unknown to the world ten or twenty years ago. They were unheard of when my compa nions and I were college stu dents. More recently man made satellites, rockets, mis siles, atomic energy, space ex ploration have come to add to the fund of skills, techniques, and knowledge of ma n'. Whether we like them or not, they affect our ways of think ing, our methods of living, our systems of production, and our relations with the rest of mankind. Graduates or alum ni of institutions of learning who received their degrees fifteen or twenty years ago would be uttering plain non sense if they should now in sist that what they learned and what their colleges had given them when they were students are good enough for their children and the stu dents of today. If they ex pect their. £ma Mater to be content with what it taught them and how it instructed them during their own stu dent days, they are certainly grossly mistaken and their nostalgic feeling may well condemn them to the catego ry of modern Rip Van Win kles. 24 Panorama With the changes taking place at such a rapid rate in the present-day world, edu cation must necessarily be planned and developed with a view to taking such changes into account. This does not mean that every student should be expected to se cure an education that would enable him to master all the developments of science and scholarship that have taken place and that will continue to take place. That would be an impossible thing to do; and college education is not intended to give any one an encyclopedic grasp of the entire field of knowledge. The essential element of real education in our day is the development of a person’s abi lity to think and to decide in terms of the changes affecting his life and his particular work; and the college should so plan its instruction that its students may be adequately prepared to pursue the ca reer they expect to follow and to understand its problems by reason of their college edu cation. In order to reach this ob jective it is necessary that col lege education should be a process of making a student learn how to learn. It is only in this way that the develop ment of the intellectual abi lity of the student through college education may conti nue throughout his life. It is only through such a process that college education could serve as a basis to prepare the student to meet new pro blems, to understand them, and to analyze them as they arise in his daily life. These changes that science has produced and will go on producing have a decided im pact on the activities of our country. They cannot be dis regarded with impunity. To ignore them or to pay little heed to them for any reason whatever, whether political or sectarian or ideological or racial in nature, is to invite retardation or perhaps disas ter to our economic, social, industrial, or political pro gress. Our student population has to be trained and educat ed to understand these changes. Not all of them have the same interests, attitudes, and capacities. Consequently, not all of them should be made to follow one single way of preparing themselves for the different task? that await them. If our education al system is to follow a uni form and rigid plan of study beyond what may be consi dered the basic essentials of learning, it is bound to be of very little value as an instru ment of social progress. The rapid changes in the December 1961 25 nature, the quantity, and the quality of the fund of human knowledge should suggest that colleges give much im portance to the study of science. But this should not mean that our students should all try to become scientists and that we should give pre ference to prospective scien tists in college admissions and scholarship awards. On this subject I agree with the ideas expressed by Dael Wolfle of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when he said: “The changes that characterize the contem porary world came very lar gely from the work of scien tists and engineers. There is a need for more well trained scientists and engineers, but there is an even greater need to have science better under stood by the general public, and to have lawyers, business men, statesmen, and members of other professions under stand science better than most of the members of those pro fessions now do. Science has become an instrument of such power in changing society that we can no longer afford to have science understood and thought about only by scientists. “Of course we do not want our statesmen to be atomic physicists or experts in bio chemistry; we do not want our business leaders to be physiologists or specialists in mathematics. But we do want them to understand what science is about, how the scientist works, and the rela tions between scientific work and practical affairs. How else can they make sensible judgments about the many aspects of government or business that result from scientific work or that in fluence — favorably or un favorably — the future course of the country’s total pro gress? To serve wisely in such a position, it is necessa ry to have an understanding of some of the trends of his tory, of some of the charact eristics of our national life. In the same sense, and for the same reason, it is essential to understand something about science.” But the problem of college education is not merely one of curriculum content and method of teaching. It is not as simple as that. It is not simply a matter of raising funds for our educational ac tivities, important as this mat ter is. It is not merely a mat ter of training teachers who are competent to teach their respective subjects in the cur riculum of a college, although this too is a very important requirement. It is also a pro blem of human materials, the 26 Panorama type and quality of men and women that enter college as students. This is a very im portant aspect of the problem of college education; but un til quite recently, it has not received the attention that it deserves. If our educational program is to be of benefit to the en tire nation, as it must be, it has to take into consideration the differences of our students in regard to their mental, physical, and emotional qua lities. It has to take into ac count the differences of their interests and attitudes. This is a task that requires not only good school administra tors and teachers but also, and especially, guidance coun selors for without the assis tance of this group of workers colleges and universities will be unable to render the kind of service best needed by the country. We do not need to be repeatedly told that the most precious resources of a nation are its men and wo men; and the best way of de veloping these human re sources is to give them the education most suitable to the different individual capacities in order that each person could be of best use to him self and to society. That we have not given enough atten tion to this subject is attested by the fact that certain pro fessions are overcrowded and many of those who are in these professions are unfit and dissatisfied with their work. They represent a ver itable social and national loss in the sense that they could have been bf greater value if they had been pro perly guided in the selec tion of their vocation or pro fession. How to identify and classi fy dull students, average minds, and the highly talent ed ones is one of the most cri tical problems of education. How to guide them to their proper places in the educa tional program is another se rious task that colleges should undertake. The work of ad vising, counseling, and guid ing every student that comes under each one of these clas ses is itself a job that requires serious study and prepara tion. The education of the counselor is by itself as im portant as the significance of his task. The success and fai lure of the student, his value as a citizen and as a worker, his happiness or his grief may well depend upon proper counseling and advising. But even more than that, the cor rect (identification of our bright and talented young men and women determines the degree of progress that could be attained by our December 1961 27 country; for without them, we cannot well hope to have highly talented leaders and workers, scientists and tech nicians, statesmen and other men of vision upon whom the greatness of a nation depends. Hence arises the value of discussing the various aspects of the problems of counseling in our colleges and universi ties. The materials neces sary for the leadership of the nation must be well selected. This is specially true and urgent at this particular stage in our histo ry for we have the freedom to build our own national structure. Just as in the case of the construction of a house, we can make it a strong edi fice only if we have a solid foundation and a strong su perstructure. To secure this result, it is the part of wisdom to classify the different pieces of lumber and materials ac cording to their respective qualities of strength and adaptability. The same process is needed in the construction of the na tional edifice. The different kinds of men and women, in accordance with their quali fications and their potential strength, should be carefully selected and properly prepar ed for the educational devel opment for which they are best suited. It is only in that way that as citizens of the na tion they could be utilized to the best advantage and for the purpose which they could best serve. The counselors may thus be cosidered as trusted classifiers of our human resources. Their responsibility in nation building is enormous. The success of our educational en terprise greatly depends jipon them. * * * CANDOR Jeanette was wearing a new frock when her dearest friend called. “I look a perfect fright,” she remarked, eager for praise. The dearest friend was thinking of her own affairs, and answered absent-mindedly: “Yes, you certainly do.” “Oh, you horrid thing!” Jeanette gasped. “Ml never—never speak to you again.” 28 Panorama