Making kids feel good

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by Hugh Mercer Curtler

The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, by Maureen Stout, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2000. 313 pp.

MAUREEN STOUT'S important new book contains a quotation from Winston Churchill that encapsulates the essence of her argument. Churchill is quoted as having said, "Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested." And they almost certainly never will; nor will Presidents. It is a power that extends to all who teach, and it goes unchecked, given the relative positions of student and teacher in the classroom. Education is about power, and no one understands this better than Stout. Education is about the power that teachers have, which is inordinate; and it is about the power that students are supposed to acquire as a result of their education. The latter is a power over themselves, which results, or should result, from the development of their minds as they gradually acquire the ability to make informed, autonomous choices: a power that results in positive human freedom.

Ironically, if Stout is correct, the power that teachers have at present rules out the likelihood that students will ever achieve the power that will set them free. This is because teachers, and schools of education, have been wedded for at least half a century to the foolish notion that students, all students, regardless of their ability, are extraordinary. This is what Stout calls the "self-esteem" movement, and as she takes great pains to show, it is anathema to genuine education.

In her carefully documented argument, Stout demonstrates how devastating this movement has been to America's system of public education, from kindergarten through college. She has no fear of overstatement or hyperbole, for she can exclaim that "the self-esteem movement has caused an intellectual earthquake of such magnitude that its aftershocks will continue to reverberate throughout our schools ... unless we take swift action to stop it."

However, the likelihood that "swift action" will be taken is practically nil, given the evidence Stout draws on to show how tightly the movement has American public education in its grip, as well as how defensive those in schools of education tend to be. Having bought into a fiction and allowed it to work its way deep into their consciousness, teachers in our public schools do not take lightly attacks against their sacred shibboleths. K-12 educators, almost without exception, are convinced (for no good reason) that if they simply tell Suzy and Fred that they are wonderful, they will perform to the highest possible standards in school.

Now there is an element of truth in this myth, and it is this element that has caused most of the harm. The evidence that has been built up over the years by people sympathetic to the self-esteem movement has, ironically, failed to show any correlation whatever between praise and performance. But common sense tells us that praise is a good motivator. The problem is that our teachers are being taught to heap praise on their students for no good reason. The students know they will be praised simply for breathing: they do not have to do a thing! There is simply no evidence to support this extreme view of the efficacy of praise. At some point, students must be required to perform. That is, teachers must have high expectations of their students, students must make an effort and risk failure (from which they can learn a great deal), and praise must come at the end, even if the results are meager. If Stout is correct, our schools have bought wholesale into a doctrine that has it all backwards: praise is the effect of accomplishment, not its cause.

Some years ago, when the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" was still appearing, Irecall a series of episodes in which Calvin was explaining to Hobbes that he has discovered the secret to success: simply lower the bar far enough, and behold, one has already reached all of one's goals! How funny. And how sad. Calvin may feel great about his "accomplishments," but he will never learn anything; he will never grow. Calvin, of course, is a typical student in our schools. He has not learned anything, but he feels good about himself, because he has been told so often how wonderful he is. And that, apparently, is good enough for our teachers, because that is the focus of our present educational system. This student will not learn anything, but he or she will be promoted to the next grade ("social promotion" Stout calls it) and eventually will graduate. Many such students--more each year--go on to college, where as many as half will be forced to do remedial work in mathematics and in English.

We have known that there was a serious problem in our schools at least since the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983. This document was dismissed as "conservative" (and therefore not worthy of serious attention: so much for our openmindedness as an academic community), because it was written during the Reagan Presidency. Be that as it may, the figures revealed in this "political" document are sobering. American students showed up poorly when compared with students in other industrialized nations. For example, American students failed to come in first or second in any of nineteen academic tests, and they came in last seven times. The Commission noted that the achievement of American high school students on most standardized tests was lower than it had been when tested a quarter century previously, and that many seventeen year-olds do not possess the "higher order" intellectual skills necessary to write a persuasive essay or to solve a mathematical problem involving several steps.