Guidance Counseling in the Midcentury United States: Measurement, Grouping, and the Making of the Intelligent Self

This article takes up National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and NDEA-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of an emergent profession—the guidance counselor—which was to play an instrumental role in public schools in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelligence” or academic “ability.” My analysis will show that, according to its advocates, guidance counseling would not only inform the self-understanding of the measured individual, but it would also work to condition the ideology of individual “intelligence” across numerous layers of social life around the student: through peer group, through teachers and school administrators, and finally through home, family and wider community. But these policy arguments related to testing and counseling were occurring not just in the wake of the NDEA, but also in the very recent context of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the far-reaching Supreme Court mandate to desegregate public schools. Thus, I argue that a large portion of nation-wide unease among whites about desegregation—which was perceived at root as a problem of contact and grouping—was translated, at least in part, into calls for increased and more systematic grouping of another kind, now by individual “ability” or “intelligence.” This shift in grouping would occur within an integrating yet also a rapidly stratifying public school curriculum. I have begun this argument elsewhere, and further develop it here by demonstrating the role guidance counseling was supposed to play in this process.