Finally, proponents of the “self-esteem” school of educating have admitted what the rest of us have known all along: that “self-esteem” is a racket. Read this headline from a story in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post: “Teachers trying to curb ’empty praise.’ ” The following passages are from the body of the story:
“For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates, but few, if any, academic gains.”
What the story doesn’t say is who are the parties that clung to this “prevailing wisdom.” I’m almost dead certain it wasn’t any of the teachers I had during the years 1956 — when I entered kindergarten — to 1969, when I graduated high school.
My teachers didn’t give a tinker’s dam about my “self-esteem.” That’s because they were too busy teaching. When they got done with me, I could read, write and communicate effectively.
I could recite passages of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and some of William Shakespeare’s plays from memory.
I learned the basics of human anatomy in my science classes and, to this day, can still convert certain fractions to their decimal and percentage equivalents and back again.
Thank heavens teachers didn’t worry about students’ self-esteem during my school days. I might not have learned a darned thing.
In fact, not only did teachers pass on trying to build our self-esteem, but they also had no problem in telling us we weren’t cutting the mustard academically.
“You’re not ready,” my ninth-grade English teacher, Calvin Scott, would tell us almost daily. Ms. Holmes, my eighth-grade algebra teacher, would chide those “trifling students” who didn’t bother to do homework. Other teachers warned us that if we didn’t get it together academically, we’d have to learn what they were trying to teach us in summer school.
Trust me, few students from my era wanted to be caught in summer school. Only bona fide nitwits went to summer school, struggling to learn subjects they could have learned during the school year while their classmates romped in the summer sun.
That was before the self-esteem crowd came along. Teachers like Mr. Scott, who challenged students to be better than they were, and Ms. Holmes, who held her students to high academic standards, were now persona non grata. The new thinking went something like this.
Don’t give students bad grades. It might harm their self-esteem. Don’t chide them when they’re wrong or step out of line. That’s not good for their self-esteem either.
A student hasn’t mastered the work for one grade level? Why, pass him or her on to the next grade anyway, to boost his or her self-esteem.
I wonder if any data exist showing the numbers of students who were socially promoted because of the self-esteem racket.
I suspect it’s these self-esteem racketeers who are partially responsible for the racial achievement gap in education. Black students graduate high school, on average, four years behind white students.
How much of that can be attributed to social promotion, which can be attributed to the push to boost the self-esteem of those black students?
For students of my era, our self-esteem stemmed from our mastery and knowledge of our subjects. We had to earn self-esteem; it couldn’t be given to us.
Or, as Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said in the Post story: “We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter. That has backfired.”
I have only one question for Dweck: Where does she get that “we” stuff?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
