With May being designated children’s month, a critical area of their lives
deserving close attention is their education and the counsel they need to make
their way through school.
They need counsel and guidance in order to cope, especially with the conflict and violence around them in the community, home and school. If they cannot cope in this regard, their education, which is their greatest need, will suffer.
The paucity of guidance counsellors has been known and commented on for
years, but with little or no action taken by any administration to remedy the
situation. It is commonplace for a guidance counsellor to have oversight of 200
or 300 children. How adequate can be the attention given by a counsellor to
the needs of several teenagers in acute distress, all at the same time?
One’s distress may derive from a situation requiring several home visits.
Another’s distress may require the prompt follow-up required after psychiatric, in-depth
examination and medication.
A third may be thinking of suicide. The role of a good counsellor is critical.
Not infrequently, a child’s problem stems from bullying in a particular field
exercise or classroom. The counsellor will need to work along with the class
teacher or sports coach, which can be time consuming. Clearly, the number of
guidance counsellors require immediate increase. This means addressing the
matter of their training in teachers’ colleges.
The church pastor who has not received professional training cannot be regarded as a substitute. There are those who see and want to treat every instance of conflict and
violence in schools as a police matter - to be resolved by weapons searches
and police presence.
Sometimes these measures are required.
However, in most cases school violence is a primarily social not security issue.
Social workers and guidance counsellors are the primary requirement to give our
children their rights. The usual reply that resources are lacking is unacceptable,
when priority is seen given to prettying up the school for graduation exercises.
One set of students to whom special consideration must be given is the
disabled, whether physically or cognitively. Those with disabilities are
frequently ignored as though they don’t count as humans.
The training ofguidance counsellors will need to include a grasp of how to meet with the
needs of the disabled.
The basic truth is that rights are the possession and privilige of every human.
Whether healthy or disabled, the child has rights by the simple fact that she or
he is human.
To deny some children their native rights as humans is to cast a dark shadow over the rights of all the others.
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