Control, Conditioning, and Counseling

Psychology, as the science of behavior, is concerned with the understanding, prediction, and control of such behavior. Counseling and psychotherapy, it is asserted, have as goals the changing of behavior. An individual who is unproductive, unhappy, frustrated, dependent, irresponsible, overly submissive or overly aggressive, et cetera, is expected to become productive, happy, independent, responsible, able to function without undue submissiveness or aggressiveness or other undesirable or self-defeating behavior. In the school situation, we hope that counseling will produce a well behaved student, one who shows the proper degree of dependence and independence, who is attentive, interested, motivated, and achieves up to his ability level, in other words, the ideal student. And often teachers and administrators are not concerned about how the counselor achieves this result, as long as he achieves it.