COUNSELLOR’S COUNTER INSURGENCY AND THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT IN NORTHEAST GEO POLITICAL ZONE, NIGRERIA

OLADEJO, Bolaji

Abstract

Many decades ago, professional counsellors are deployed in schools across the country especially at secondary schools and higher level in order to provide guidance and counselling related roles such as social-personal, vocational, educational etc. For the past two decades, the country is erupted with the deadly activities of Boko Haram groups that believed strongly in the ideology that western education is evil. As such frequent attacks on the educational institutions, killing of students and their teachers, total destructions of facilities necessitated that professional counsellors are needed in schools in order to provide security counselling to students, teachers as a counter insurgency strategies to reduce the tempo of attacks and vulnerability of innocent victims. This was achievable though harnessing the professional skills and techniques of counsellors such as probing, interrogation of issues, analysis and coming out with decisive predictions to safe guide lives and school properties in the Northeast Nigeria as a model for low risk schools in the country. This paper examined the limitation of counsellors on the fields, interrogated the new roles of security counselling as counter insurgency strategies for 21century schools. The paper made recommendations that could better education counsellors.