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Guidance Services

CHAPTER I
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Introduction
Historically, the term guidance has been used in the field of education to designate the assistance given to students in the solution of problems that lay outside the area of classroom teaching situations. For instance, ever since the first decade of the present century, guidance has meant, to a large extent, the guidance of students in the area of vocational problems.
By about 1925, a growing number of colleges and universities were providing guidance services for their students. These activities were more commonly referred to as student personnel services. Today, these services constitute an all-embracing program of assistance to students; this program, of course, includes guidance services. At the high-school level as well as at the college level, these services have more and more included assistance to students in solving their educational, vocational, and personal problems.
In its early years, the vocational guidance movement was initiated and conducted primarily by semipublic, philanthropic agencies; it also was fostered by some of the public school systems in larger cities. The guidance services thus furnished were offered mainly to young people of high-school age.
For decades, teachers in the elementary grades have aided their pupils in adjusting themselves to their problems. Although these teachers have been most concerned with training pupils in the essential skills and content fields, they have rendered aid in nonacademic as well as academic fields both inside and outside of the classroom. For this reason, some elementary schools were slow to recognize that pupils should have special services over and above those normally provided by classroom teachers. As recognition of this need has grown, however, elementary schools have employed school psychologists, adjustment teachers, and child guidance workers to give attention to the whole child and to his special needs and wants....