Mentoring defined by Megginson and Clutterbuck (1995) is the “off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge, work and/or thinking”. That one wise and trusted person is called a mentor as well as motivator, adviser, facilitator just to mention a few. Mentoring has been in practice since the dawn of the existence of humans, but it is quite becoming a necessity given the complexity of the world and the faster depletion of moral fabric and other irrationalities in today’s society.
As such, mentoring should be encouraged as part of the learning process in our various levels of schooling especially at the higher education level as students at this level are at the brink of their “future”. Hence, students should be urged to go through this imperative process of mentoring for grooming to become better and useful persons. The need for this art of mentoring in learning institutions has its rationales, which is elaborated as follows: Purpose of Education – students should be urged to go through mentoring so as to enable their comprehension of the purpose of education. Especially at the higher level, some students barely have an idea or passion of the programmes they are offered to read. Additionally, some students normally even do not know their purpose of being in school- they are there because their friends and other people are going, in other words bandwagon students. Worst of all, some students go to school just for going sake. Mentoring, will find an antidote to these instances as mentors like responsible and experienced parents, adult friends, peers, lecturers/teachers and so on will take students through understanding the purpose and essence of education and share with them some of the practical benefits of education. Creation of Self-awareness – Mostly, people fail or succeed in life as a result of their knowledge or ignorance of their strengths and weaknesses. People normally take some paths in life they have no knowledge of whiles others take a path because some people have taken same (another situation of bandwagon). The process of mentoring will take students through an assessment, monitoring and evaluation process to unearth their intellectual, social and emotional strengths and weaknesses. “There are no hard times, is just that we fail to see the chapportunities at hand at hand”.(Chapportunites means challenges with opportunities) Therefore, mentoring to create self-awareness will help students to take advantage of the opportunities their strengths present and also work on weaknesses to ensure personal development. Career Development – As students are now abreast with the purpose of education and self-awareness, these leave a suitable avenue for them or allow mentors to choose a career path according to their intellectual and social strengths. This will allow them develop and practice a career that will make them highly productive and useful in society.
Purpose of education; creation of self-awareness and career development. As short as this essence of mentoring outline may be, it is very crucial to students and other individuals as, ignorance of these, are tantamount to failure in life.
In this light, it is an appeal to students at all levels to adopt the attitude of going through mentoring or learning institutions should make students adapt to mentoring as part of the schools’ curricula. These, in a long term, in a way, aid curb the unprecedented unemployment rate we face today.
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