Dinkmeyer, Don C. (Ed.) Guidance and counseling in the elementary school. Readings in theory and practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1968, 416 p., $5.95 (paper)
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1968
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 168 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0033-3085
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
95 (paper)
. If any area of educational practice has required reevaluation and creative redirection it is that of counseling and guidance. The three new books noted in this issue present critical discussions of emergent problems, methods, roles, and programs of counseling and guidance in the rapidly changing contemporary social scene. The authors of the first and editors and contributors to the other two have managed to raise more questions than they answer, but many of these are important questions that must be faced and for which comfortable answers are not easily forthcoming. Further, they are readable and provocative of purposeful examination of significant issues.
Kowitz and Kowitz, a husband-wife team at the University of Oklahoma, have attempted forthrightly "to study carefully persistent problems, and to evaluate procedures in terms of the operation of a modern school and its relationships to current society." The treatment, which draws ideas from other disciplines, including psychology and management science, is in four parts: (a) historical antecedents of guidance work and current social forces shaping assignments within the guidance services; (b) traditional activities of guidance workers and emerging problems ; (c) principles of modern management, organizational operations, and the functioning of a professional team; and (d) the guidance program as an integral function of the modern school.
If the first three parts are regarded as defining issues and setting the stage for the concluding, problem-solving section, then the buildup must be regarded aa both exciting and enlightening, but the denouement is disappointing. In their enthusiasm, the authors have developed a systems-components model providing services to students, teaching-curriculum functions, and the topside executiveadministrative activities of the school system, of such scope and magnitude that it approximates the form and functions of the system it is designed to serve. If this is disappointing it is also interesting and instructive. The solution proposed inadvertently may also be what is needed, a guidance-oriented, therapeutic school system.