Two Quarries with a Single Stone

A N INDIVIDUALIZED approach is one of the most effective methods in education as well as one of the most expensive. This article describes a program at Ohio State University where two individualized approaches, namely, remedial work with college students and training of personnel workers, complement each other under a single budget. Training in study skills and aiding with adjustment problems are accepted parts of college personnel programs. However, there is evidence that lectures and class work are not nearly so effective as is an individualized approach. Th-is is probably due to two facts: Problems which remain after years of class work will not be altered by a few additional talks. Students are not able to diagnose their own difficulties much beyond a complaint of inability to concentrate and projections of mistreatment, much less plan and carry out a remedial program. However, an ideal pupil-counselor relationship does not usually fit the prevalent administrative pupil-teacher load, much to the detriment of the growth of such a program. The procedures described in this article suggest a solution of this problem. Personnel workers have sometimes been described as teachers who found persons and their problems more interesting than subject-matter or, cynically, as those teachers who could not get a job at regular teaching. Certainly, the presence of personnel workers trained directly as such has been a rarity. Much has been written, in recent years, on the need of an organized program for training personnel workers, and some progress has been made toward this end, but lecture courses alone cannot provide such training. The delicate dynamic relations in a conference and the complex difficulties in solving an individual's problems demand training in practical situations, that is, making diagnostic and remedial suggestions, managing therapeutic procedures, checking on mannerisms in counseling, building up selfconfidence, and learning aspects of counseling work not characterized by organized factual knowledge. In such practicums, mere experience is not the best teacher. Unsupervised practice allows inefficient success to pass as best performance, thus fixing poor skills and attitudes as bases for later counseling activities. Each counselor's techniques must be care-