History of
Guidance and
Counseling
Christian E. Jordan, MA, RGC
Guidance Tools and Counseling
Techniques
The history of guidance and
counseling formally started at the
turn of the twentieth century,
although a case can be made for
tracing the foundations of
counseling and guidance principles
to ancient Greece and Rome with
the philosophical teachings of Plato
and Aristotle.
There is also evidence to argue that
some of the techniques and skills of
modern-day guidance counselors
were practiced by Catholic priests in
the Middle Ages, as can be seen by
the dedication to the concept of
confidentiality within the
confessional.
The factors leading to the development of
guidance and counseling in the United
States began in the 1890s with the social
reform movement.
Societal Problems:
people living in urban slums
widespread use of child labor
Social Reforms:
the compulsory education movement
the vocational guidance movement, which,
in its early days, was concerned with
guiding people into the workforce to become
productive members of society.
Frank
Parsons
The social and political reformer
the father of the vocational
guidance movement.
His work with the Civic Service
House led to the development of
the Boston Vocation Bureau.
Boston Vocation
Bureau
In 1909 it helped outline a system of vocational
guidance in the Boston public schools.
The work of the bureau influenced the need for
and the use of vocational guidance both in the
United States and other countries.
By 1918 there were documented accounts of the
bureau's influence as far away as Uruguay and
China.
Guidance and counseling in these early years were
considered to be mostly vocational in nature, but
as the profession advanced other personal
concerns became part of the school counselor's
agenda.
The United States' entry into World War I
brought the need for assessment of large
groups of draftees, in large part to select
appropriate people for leadership
positions.
These early psychological assessments
performed on large groups of people were
quickly identified as being valuable tools
to be used in the educational system , thus
beginning the standardized testing
movement that in the early twenty-first
century is still a strong aspect of U.S.
public education.
At the same time, vocational guidance
was spreading throughout the country, so
that by 1918 more than 900 high schools
had some type of vocational guidance
system.
In 1913 the National Vocational Guidance
Association was formed and helped
legitimize and increase the number of
guidance counselors.
Early vocational guidance counselors
were often teachers appointed to assume
the extra duties of the position in addition
to their regular teaching responsibilities.
The 1920s and 1930s saw an
expansion of counseling roles
beyond working only with vocational
concerns. Social, personal, and
educational aspects of a student's
life also needed attention.
After World War II a strong trend away
from testing appeared. One of the
main persons indirectly responsible for
this shift was the American
psychologist Carl Rogers.
Many in the counseling field adopted
his emphasis on "nondirective" (later
called "client-centered") counseling.
This new theory minimized counselor
advice-giving and stressed the creation
of conditions that left the client more
in control of the counseling content.
In the 1950s the American
School Counselor Association
(ASCA) was formed, furthering
the professional identity of the
school counselor.
In the 1970s the school counselor was
beginning to be defined as part of a
larger program, as opposed to being
the entire program.
This decade also gave rise to the
special education movement. The
educational and counseling needs of
students with disabilities were
addressed with the passage of the
Education for All Handicapped
Children Act in 1975.
The 1980s saw the development of
training standards and criteria for school
counseling.
This was also a time of more intense
evaluation of education as whole and
counseling programs in particular.
In order for schools to provide adequate
educational opportunities for individuals
with disabilities, school counselors were
trained to adapt the educational
environment to student needs.
The development of national
educational standards and the school
reform movement of the 1990s ignored
school counseling as an integral part of
a student's educational development.
The ASCA compensated partially with
the development of national standards
for school counseling programs.
These standards clearly defined the
roles and responsibilities of school
counseling programs and showed the
necessity of school counseling for the
overall educational development of
every student.
