Indigenous counseling: A needed area in school counseling in Nigeria

Abstract

Indigenous counselling has not been given attention in Nigeria’s school counselling programme. This counselling gap was created by European colonialism, which succeeded in developing in the minds of the African that anything indigenous is local, unscientific and unorthodox. Indigenous counselling is one of the casualties of colonial mentality. Counselling which is supposed to be a culturally loaded process for helping individuals to either regain or take direction for their lives is dominated by Western counselling. This neglect of indigenous counselling in the school counselling, forms the basis of this paper. The paper examines the relevant aspects of indigenous counselling and the need for indigenous counselling in Nigeria’s school counselling programme. The paper recommends a synthetic counselling curriculum made up of indigenous and western counselling for the school. Indigenous counselling should have an association of their own as the western trained counsellors in order to keep the ethics of their profession. Government should continue the training of more counsellors to make it possible for most schools to benefit from the counsellors’ services. There is also the need for indigenous counsellors to complement the efforts of the western counsellors in order to assist the students maximize their potentials as best as possible.