Greater Expectations. - book review

Public Interest, Summer, 1995 by Susan Kristol

I recently learned that the principal of my children's elementary school in McLean, Virginia, is reading William Damon's Greater Expectations.[dagger] This is good news. Damon is an advocate of high academic standards for young people. A champion of the ethic of achievement through hard work, his thesis is that children "thrive on challenges and on chances to prove themselves."

Furthermore, because of who he is, Damon's message is likely to win a hearing among educators. A professor of education at Brown University, the director of its Center for the Study for Human Development, the author of scholarly articles and books on child psychology and educational theory, Damon hails from the inner circles of what William Bennett used to call "the blob" - the nexus of professional educators, bureaucrats, experts, and union officials who wield great power in our schools. And yet, in Greater Expectations, Damon the insider presents himself as a critic of the education establishment and the myths it has promulgated.

Damon argues that too many of today's adults have been wrongly persuaded by a host of experts to believe that children are frail, impressionable beings who must never be pushed too hard to achieve. We have been taught that asking children to study hard, to do household chores, or to spend time helping in the community may damage their self-esteem or stifle their creativity, robbing them of their precious, fleeting, childhood years. Exposing children to the world of religious belief, the experts tell us, will harm them by introducing them to concepts too difficult and threatening.

Damon believes that in a well-intentioned attempt to do what is best for children, adults have deprived them of the joys of achievement and the rewards of focusing on things outside of, or above, themselves. Once true accomplishment, spirituality, and service to others have been removed from the lives of young people, nothing is left to give them meaning. "Unless we raise standards and expectations for all children in our society," warns Damon, "our affluent communities will turn into places that are just as deadly as the downtrodden ones are today. That is why I take standards, and not material resources, to be the heart of the matter."

No myth is perhaps so pervasive and destructive in the realm of education and child-rearing, Damon argues, as the myth of self-esteem. Most parents of school children today will be familiar with the obeisance paid to this secular deity. The dogma of self-esteem holds that children cannot begin to succeed in school or in life unless they have a "positive self-image." Not until they feel good about themselves are they free to turn their attention to learning. The most harmful corollary of this view is that difficult subject material must be introduced to children with great caution, even trepidation, because failure to master the material quickly will prove harmful to their self-esteem and prevent any further progress. My husband and I found this to be true several years ago when we asked our daughter's teacher why the class had learned nothing new in math by November. Her earnest reply was: "We go slowly so that the children will feel success."

It is, of course, true that children who have been abandoned or abused by their parents may be too pre-occupied to proceed with their studies; they may need the protection and help of social workers and policemen before they can be expected to focus on schoolwork. But most children enjoy striving to meet high expectations and see empty praise for what it is. As Damon explains,

it is not in children's natures to find challenge stressful, as long as they are given support while facing the challenge. In fact, what children find far more stressful is the expectational vacuum created by a lack of challenge. This is the real risk for today's child - nothing to strive for.

True self-esteem is thus the result of effort and achievement, not the precondition.

Now that the myth of the primacy of self-esteem has taken root in the education establishment's back yard, it has spread like an invasive weed. For over fifteen years, scholarly studies have been available that called into question the conventional dogma about self-esteem. Even so, the self-esteem industry is still flourishing, filling the pages of child-rearing manuals, keeping an army of guidance counselors in business, providing the theoretical underpinnings for bilingual education and Afrocentric curricula, and leading Congress to offer hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for programs to stem the (doubtful) loss of self-esteem among adolescent girls.

Herein lies Damon's usefulness. When I complain about the need for a more stimulating curriculum in my children's schools, I can easily be dismissed as another pushy parent. When William Bennett talks this way, he is a moralistic politician. When Chester Finn writes this way, he is a predictable neoconservative theorist. But when William Damon says it, he has a chance of persuading school administrators to adopt his recommendations.