Guidance and counselling vital in schools, colleges

By Emmanuel Mungwarakarama
Monday, 16 October 2006
One of the challenges schools and higher institutions of learning are struggling with is indiscipline. In most of these places, students do not give way to a teacher or a lecturer in corridors or pavements. They merely stand in their groups chatting and the teacher has to squeeze his way through.Teachers in many schools have complained about lack of classroom manners. For instance, students walk in and out of classrooms when a lesson is going on without excusing themselves, chew gum in class, murmur to each other, do not take notes and engage in other naughty behaviour. A teacher who took the trouble to find out why this was so was told blankly, by his students, that that is what they were used to. Other serious cases of indiscipline noted in schools include rudeness to teachers and subordinate staff, sneaking out of schools, absenteeism from classes without sound reason (infamously known as ‘dodging’), smoking and use of narcotic drugs, alcohol consumption and promiscuity among many others. Students have been seen in full school uniform frequenting restaurants around their schools where they drink alcohol without shame. The discipline office in most schools has been noted to be the busiest of all offices in schools. If it is not handling a case of misconduct, it is giving permission to students to go home, especially on Fridays, for various reasons, some of which might not even be genuine. Indiscipline is caused by many factors and it is not easy to deal with but yet students need to be shown the right ways of life so that they can grow up into responsible citizens who will be able to steer their countries forward. Besides this, the youth need to be moulded into a people who can go out into the world and fit in it as opposed to being misfits.Teachers and school authorities, beyond offering knowledge and skills, are doing their best, with the available resources, to check the rate of the unruliness in their respective institutions. For instance, most schools have rules and regulations for guiding students and helping authorities in the daily smooth running of school.Students and their guardians normally sign a copy of school rules on admission but it is uncertain whether they really pay any attention to them. In fact, a number of students take the rules for granted leading to pronounced forms of visible delinquency.But even then, imparting discipline in youths cannot be left to schools alone. Without doubt, parents, the government and the general society are all answerable to the youth since they represent a large section of the population. Why for instance should a responsible restaurant attendant serve alcohol to students, who are in full school uniform? One way of addressing indiscipline in schools is through guidance and counselling. These tenets are important at this stage in the students’ lives because it is here that their attitudes, characters and behaviour are formed. Counselling is beneficial since it aims at enabling a person achieve better personal adjustment, growth, and maturity. Psychologists attach emotional difficulties in youth to misbehaviour. Guidance and counselling will help boost the ability of youth to take rational control over their feelings, aid the youth to aim at fulfilling their potentials and achieve an assimilation of past conflicting parts of themselves. Feelings of inadequacies often lead to withdrawal, unhappiness, annoyance, anger, anxiety and hyper-activity in young people. Counselling helps students develop a positive attitude about themselves, enhance their abilities to recognise their areas of proficiency and enables them to make individual choices that become useful in future after their years of formal education. Rwanda, like other African countries, has experienced an infiltration of foreign cultures, political demands/expectations, wars, political instability, poverty and epidemics all of which have weakened the traditional societal structures and led to an increase in moral decay. Guidance and counselling can offer the best approach in amending the arising negative behaviour. Guidance and counselling are age-old practises in many societies. For this reason, they should be institutionalised not only in schools but also communities.