Good Counsel : Professor Finds Student Problems Have Changed

A couple of weeks ago, while boxing up 40 years of memories from teaching professional counseling to students, Paul Bruce ran across his own counseling card from student days at a Flint, Mich., high school.

The card, with its emphasis on curriculum and career matters, represented an era of counseling light-years away from the responsibilities that have taken hold during Bruce’s lengthy career, which ended this month when he retired as professor of counselor education at San Diego State University.

Today, the concerns of a school counselor go far beyond those of classroom and job preparation, to showing students how to cope with individual social problems--from drugs to child abuse to self-esteem--that society now expects schools to deal with.

Curriculum Changes

The new demands have altered the curriculum that professors like Bruce have used to train students, fueling a trend toward more family and group interventions instead of relying mainly on individual counseling.

Yet, as Bruce leaves the academic life, he finds that two major assumptions within the general field of counseling have remained constant:

- The caution that there are no panaceas to solving problems that inevitably vary from individual to individual, despite the higher expectations demanded now of school counselors.

- The importance of listening closely to problems before making judgments or drawing up a treatment plan.

“And the one overriding value that I’ve held for all my career has been that of empowering people to handle more of the pressures, the enticements out in society, no matter the particular approach I use,” said the soft-spoken Bruce, still lanky at retirement from riding his bicycle between home and campus all these years. He is careful not to say “helping” people because of the note of

condescension implied by that word.

“I believe we go into professional fields where we ourselves have experienced needs of our own,” Bruce said. “And I guess my own need as a student was to be empowered, and I was.”

In fact, Bruce first heard about the place that would become his alma mater--Antioch College in Ohio--from his high school counselor. And it was through Antioch, which for years featured an unusual program of six months of study followed by six months of work each year, that Bruce developed empathy with other people. With a major in industrial psychology, Bruce worked with union organizers and later with orphanedchildren.

“What really is counseling?” mused Bruce, aware that for years the profession itself was looked upon with suspicion by the public because its field of play involves nuances and shades of gray. He said that any definition has parallels to the allegory of the four blind men, each of whom, in touching an elephant, reaches a different explanation of what he has felt.

“There is no single model or process to use in all cases,” Bruce said. School counselors, for example, may sometimes help teachers work better with students within the regular classroom, or they may help parents both individually or in groups, as well as meet with clusters of students or even promote and train some students to “peer counsel” others. In trying to bolster a student’s self-esteem, a counselor has at least three approaches, depending on the sense of which one the student will respond to best, Bruce said.

“But the fact is inescapable that today counseling increasingly is more social than educational.”

Keeping Up With Changes

For institutions such as SDSU, the challenge is to keep up with such changes, in large part because faculty members tend to have specialties within the general field that may not fully address trends, Bruce said. Bruce himself has specialized in one-to-one counseling, but both demands of society and new state requirements mandate more attention to group counseling and consultation.

In addition, problems of drug abuse, child abuse, alcohol and other social ills have led more students to consider specialties in marriage and family counseling, rather than school counseling alone.

“That is in line with having to deal with a wider range of issues that involve family problems and must be addressed as a family,” Bruce said, comparing his own experience in counseling students at SDSU when he first arrived to a recent stint just before retirement.

“Back then, the question from students was always, ‘Why am I here?’ and we would talk about that,” he said. “Now it’s issues of depression, suicide, marriage--just greater severity.”

Bruce finds fault with limited counseling training for future teachers, who are on the forefront of recognizing student problems. Guidance and counseling have become a lower priority since the mid-1970s, and state education officials have added other curriculum requirements instead, he said.

“But it’s amazing that sometimes a student can be empowered by just talking about concerns with a teacher,” Bruce said.

In that vein, Bruce said that elementary counseling centers, established in almost all 107 of San Diego city elementary schools, have worked better than expected. The centers are partly funded by the Kiwanis Clubs of San Diego.

‘Purpose Is Preventive’

“Their purpose is preventive, to allow kids to be able to come to handle pressures on their own, rather than to be defeated by them,” Bruce said. “I know it’s hard to define or substantiate with an average, but if a student can sometimes just talk out their own experiences, the results are to reduce the impact” of the problem.

However, he believes that counseling at the secondary level has progressed little in contrast, and that too many counselors are still forced to push paper and approve student class schedules rather than be allowed to use their training in substantive ways. Continuing concern about the effectiveness of secondary-school counseling has plagued San Diego city school administrators and has been a topic of many school board meetings during the past several years.

“In some districts, the counselors aren’t even allowed to try and carry out the functions they have been trained to do, but are told simply to make referrals to social service agencies,” Bruce said.

He returned to the question of how to define the nature of counseling.

“It may seem that answers are difficult to give because the problems never really go away. Compared to a generation ago, the institutions of society are not as strong as they used to be: the family, the school, the church. They all used to have a much stronger impact on people and on kids in particular.

“Today, the school is the only institution that has contact with such a wide universe and is affected by everything that goes on in society.

“And the mission of counselors, while not impossible, often comes close to being just that.”