Making kids feel good

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by Hugh Mercer Curtler

While one may quibble about the objectivity of the testers, there have been enough follow-up tests conducted by respectable groups to corroborate the main conclusions of the Commission's report. And those of us who teach in higher education have enough anecdotes about the under-preparedness of our students to fill books.

Typically, however, when this topic comes up, those who man the battlements of our education schools simply bury their heads deeper into the sand. Like self-esteem promoter John Vasconcellos, when told that self-esteem "theory" is weakening our childrens' minds, making them slaves to the latest fashion or the most transparent demagoguery, they will reply blithely, "All the research in the world won't change my mind about it." This attitude is reflected in a recent report in The Chronicle of Higher Education which noted that faculty in virtually every major academic discipline except education complained that their students were seriously under-prepared for college-level work.

Maureen Stout operates from inside the educational establishment, holding a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles, and having taught for years in the Education Department at the University of California at Northridge. Her argument has the ring of truth to it, and carries considerable weight. She has seen close-up how tenaciously educators cling to this self-esteem nonsense and how it destroys the minds of the young who are subjected to it. She makes a strong case that it leads directly to narcissism, or to the preoccupation with self; separatism, or loss of a sense of community and the eradication of what Aristotle called "civic virtue"; emotivism, or the rejection of all truth and value in the name of "feelings"; and cynicism, or the view that nothing really matters.

In addition, Stout insists, the self-esteem movement is directly or indirectly responsible for the dumbing down of the curriculum at all academic levels, grade inflation, loss of motivation on the part of the taught and of many teachers, a broad and pervasive sense of entitlement among students generally, political correctness, the "culture wars," and rampant anti-intellectualism in our schools. Yet, without the ability to think, what kind of future do these young people have? And what kind of future does our democracy face when it is peopled by mis-educated students whose only claim to be taken seriously is that they feel good about themselves?

How did this come about? To answer this, our author recounts how the self-esteem movement grew out of the side of progressive education and has given birth to a number of myths that now pervade the schools and control the thought of our teachers. Myth #1 is that "High expectations for students are damaging to their self-esteem"; Myth #2 is that "Evaluation is punitive, stressful, and damaging to self-esteem"; Myth #3 is that "Teaching and learning must always be 'relevant' and student-centered"; Myth #4 is that "Effort is more important than achievement"; Myth #5 is that "Competition leads to low self-esteem and should be replaced by cooperation"; Myth #6 is that "Students should be promoted from one grade to the next, irrespective of achievement in order to preserve their self-esteem"; Myth #7 is that "Discipline is bad for self-esteem and should be dispensed with"; Myth #8 is that "Teachers should be therapists [or best friends with their students]"; Myth #9 is that "It is the teacher's, not the student's responsibility to ensure learning"; and Myth #10 is that "Feeling is more important than thinking."