The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Branden, Nathaniel

  By way of illustration, consider an article appearing in Time (February 5, 1990) that stated:

  A standardized math test was given to 13-year-olds in six countries last year. Koreans did the best, Americans did the worst, coming in behind Spain, Ireland, and Canada. Now the bad news. Besides being shown triangles and equations, the kids were shown the statement “I am good at mathematics.” … Americans were No. 1, with an impressive 68% in agreement.

  American students may not know their math, but they have evidently absorbed the lessons of the newly fashionable self-esteem curriculum wherein kids are taught to feel good about themselves.

  Some American educators have argued that these figures are misleading because whereas other countries measured the performance of only the top 10 percent of students, the U.S. figures represent a much broader sampling, which brought our average down. They have also argued that in the Korean culture, for instance, it is far less acceptable to say complimentary things about oneself than in the American culture. Just the same, within the limits of his naive and primitive understanding of self-esteem, the criticisms of “self-esteem curricula” the author of this article goes on to make are entirely justified. He is attacking, in effect, the “feel good” approach, and the attack is deserved.

  Therefore, let me stress once again that when I write of self-efficacy or self-respect, I do so in the context of reality, not of feelings generated out of wishes or affirmations or gold stars granted as a reward for showing up. When I talk to teachers, I talk about reality-based self-esteem. Let me say further that one of the characteristics of persons with healthy self-esteem is that they tend to assess their abilities and accomplishments realistically, neither denying nor exaggerating them.

  Might a student do poorly in school and yet have good self-esteem? Of course. There are any number of reasons why a particular boy or girl might not do well scholastically, from a dyslexic condition to lack of adequate challenge and stimulation. Grades are hardly a reliable indicator of a given individual’s self-efficacy and self-respect. But rationally self-esteeming students do not delude themselves that they are doing well when they are doing poorly.

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  Self-esteem pertains to that which is open to our volitional choice. It cannot properly be a function of the family we were born into, or our race, or the color of our skin, or the achievements of our ancestors.

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  We do not serve the healthy development of young people when we convey that self-esteem may be achieved by reciting “I am special” every day, or by stroking one’s own face while saying “I love me,” or by identifying self-worth with membership in a particular group (“ethnic pride”) rather than with personal character. Let us remember that self-esteem pertains to that which is open to our volitional choice. It cannot properly be a function of the family we were born into, or our race, or the color of our skin, or the achievements of our ancestors. These are values people sometimes cling to in order to avoid responsibility for achieving authentic self-esteem. They are sources of pseudo self-esteem. Can one ever take legitimate pleasure in any of these values? Of course. Can they ever provide temporary support for fragile, growing egos? Probably. But they are not substitutes for consciousness, responsibility, or integrity. They are not sources of self-efficacy and self-respect. They can, however, become sources of self-delusion.

  On the other hand, the principle of self-acceptance can have an important application here. Some students who come from different ethnic backgrounds but who are eager to “fit in” may in effect deny and disown their distinctive ethnic context. In such cases it is clearly desirable to help students to appreciate the unique aspects of their race or culture, to “own” their history, as it were, and not treat their heritage as unreal or shameful.

  What makes the challenge of fostering children’s self-esteem particularly urgent today is that many young people arrive in school in such a condition of emotional distress that concentrating on learning can be extraordinarily difficult. Robert Reasoner, former superintendent of the Moreland School District in California, writes:

  Sixty-eight percent of children entering school today in California have both parents in the work force, which means relatively little time spent with either parent. Over 50 percent of students have already seen a family change—a separation, a divorce, or a remarriage; in many districts, by high school 68 percent are not living with their two original parents. Twenty-four percent are born out of wedlock and have never known a father. Twenty-four percent are born bearing the residual effects of their mother’s abuse of drugs. In California, 25 percent will be either sexually or physically abused before they finish high school. Twenty-five percent come from families with alcohol or drug problems. Thirty percent are living in conditions considered substandard. Fifteen percent are recent immigrants adjusting to a new culture and a new language. Whereas in 1890 90 percent of the children had grandparents living in the home, and in 1950 40 percent living in the home, today the figure is down to 7 percent; so there is far less of a support system. As to the emotional life of young people, consider these figures. Thirty to 50 percent will contemplate suicide. Fifteen percent will make a serious attempt to kill themselves. Forty-one percent drink heavily every two-three weeks. Ten percent of girls will become pregnant before they finish high school. Thirty percent of boys and girls will drop out of school by the age of eighteen.1

  Schools cannot be expected to provide solutions for all the problems in students’ lives. But good schools—which means good teachers—can make an enormous difference. In attempting to raise self-esteem in the classroom, what are the issues? In this chapter I want to address—in broad strokes—the fundamentals that need to be considered.

  The Goals of Education

  Perhaps the place to begin is with how the teacher conceives the goals of education.

  Is the primary goal to train young people to be “good citizens”? Then a high premium may be placed not on fostering autonomy or encouraging independent thinking but on memorizing a shared body of knowledge and belief, on absorbing “the rules” of the particular society, and often on learning obedience to authority. Earlier in our history, this clearly was the goal of our public educational system.

  In Breakpoint and Beyond, George Land and Beth Jarman make an interesting observation worth quoting in this context:

  As late as October of 1989, the Association of California School Administrators, operating from a viewpoint of [traditional] thinking, announced, “The purpose of the school system is not to provide students with an education.” Individual education is “a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order.” Here the leaders of one of the largest school systems in the world have declared that students can enter the twenty-first century supported by schools that do not have education as their central purpose!2

  I vividly recall my own experiences in grade school and high school during the 1930s and 1940s. The two most important values conveyed to me in that world were the ability to remain silent and motionless for long periods of time and the ability to march with my fellow students in a neat row from one classroom to another. School was not a place to learn independent thinking, to have one’s self-assertiveness encouraged, to have one’s autonomy nourished and strengthened. It was a place to learn how to fit into some nameless system created by some nameless others and called “the world” or “society” or “the way life is.” And “the way life is” was not to be questioned. Since I questioned everything and found silence and stillness unbearable, I was quickly identified as a troublemaker.

  Many brilliant minds have commented on their dismal experiences in school, their boredom, their lack of appropriate intellectual stimulation and nourishment, their sense that the last thing the educational system was designed for was the cultivation of minds. Schools were interested not in autonomy but in the manufacture of someone’s notion of “good citizens.”

  “In education,” wrote Carl Rogers in On Becoming a P
erson, “we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose education is ‘completed,’ rather than freely creative and original thinkers.”

  Commenting on this disposition of teachers (and parents) to demand obedience and conformity as primary values, to discourage rather than support normal and healthy progress toward autonomy, Jean Piaget wrote in The Moral Judgment of the Child, “If one thinks of the systematic resistance offered by people to the authoritarian method, and the admirable ingenuity employed by children the world over to evade disciplinarian constraint, one cannot help regarding as defective a system which allows so much effort to be wasted instead of using it in cooperation.”

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  What is needed and demanded today, in the age of the knowledge worker, is not robotic obedience but persons who can think.

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  There is reason to hope that this orientation is changing. The assembly line has long since ceased to be the appropriate symbol of the workplace, as we have made the transition from a manufacturing to an information society and mind work has largely replaced muscle work. What is needed and demanded today, in the age of the knowledge worker, is not robotic obedience but persons who can think; who can innovate, originate, and function self-responsibly; who are capable of self-management; who can remain individuals while working effectively as members of teams; who are confident of their powers and their ability to contribute. What the workplace needs today is self-esteem. And what the workplace needs sooner or later of necessity becomes the agenda of the schools.

  In earlier forms of industrial organization, where a great deal of work was repetitive and near mindless, obedience may have been a prized value. It is hardly the first trait a manager looks for today. A superb teacher of teachers and a specialist in educational technology that supports autonomy, Jane Bluestein observes in 21st Century Discipline, “There is evidence that children who are too obedient may have difficulty functioning in today’s work world.”3 Today, a high premium is put on initiative and self-responsibility because that is what a rapidly changing, intensely competitive economy requires.

  If schools are to be adaptive, the goals of education need to embrace more than merely mastering a particular body of knowledge that students are expected to regurgitate on exams. The aim must be to teach children how to think, how to recognize logical fallacies, how to be creative, and how to learn. This last is emphasized because of the speed with which yesterday’s knowledge becomes inadequate to today’s demands: most work now requires a commitment to lifelong learning. Among other things, young people need to learn how to use computers and libraries to access the ever-expanding new knowledge essential to their progress in the workplace.

  Schools are criticized at present because it is possible to graduate high school without knowing how to write a coherent paragraph or add up one’s restaurant check. But a mastery of simple English composition or arithmetic, while essential, does not begin to touch what a person must know today at any level above the most menial job.

  So the fostering of self-esteem must be integrated into school curricula for at least two reasons. One is to support young people in persevering with their studies, staying off drugs, preventing pregnancy, abstaining from vandalism, and gaining the education they need. The other is to help prepare them psychologically for a world in which the mind is everyone’s chief capital asset.

  I confess to cringing a little when I hear colleagues in the self-esteem/education field announce that teachers must help young people to trust their “intuition”—while not saying a word about teaching them to think, or understand the principles of logic, or have a respect for reason—thus implying that “intuition” is all they need. “Intuition” has a place in the scheme of things, to be sure, but without rationality it is dangerously unreliable. At best, it is not enough, and it is irresponsible to suggest to young people that it is. No one has ever suggested that Charles Manson did not operate “intuitively.”

  If the proper goal of education is to provide students with a foundation in the basics needed to function effectively in the modern world, then nothing is more important than building courses on the art of critical thinking into every school curriculum. And if self-esteem means confidence in our ability to cope with the challenges of life, is anything more important than learning how to use one’s mind?

  We are thinking beings and we are creative beings. Recognition of this fact needs to be at the center of any educational philosophy. When we place the value of these functions at the forefront of our curriculum, we nurture self-esteem.

  Individual teachers and designers of curricula must ask themselves: How does my work contribute to the process of young people becoming thinking, innovative, creative human beings?

  The Teacher’s Self-Esteem

  As with parents, it is easier for a teacher to inspire self-esteem in students if the teacher exemplifies and models a healthy, affirmative sense of self. Indeed, some research suggests that this is the primary factor in the teacher’s ability to contribute to a student’s self-esteem.4

  Teachers with low self-esteem tend to be more punitive, impatient, and authoritarian. They tend to focus on the child’s weaknesses rather than strengths. They inspire fearfulness and defensiveness. They encourage dependency.5

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  Low-self-esteem teachers are typically unhappy teachers.

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  Teachers with low self-esteem tend to be overdependent on the approval of others. They tend to feel that others are the source of their “self-esteem.” Therefore, they are hardly in a position to teach that self-esteem must be generated primarily from within. They tend to use their own approval and disapproval to manipulate students into obedience and conformity, since that is the approach that works when others apply it to them. They teach that self-esteem comes from “adult and peer approval.” They convey an external approach to self-esteem rather than an internal one, thereby deepening whatever self-esteem problems students already have.

  Further, low-self-esteem teachers are typically unhappy teachers, and unhappy teachers often favor demeaning and destructive tactics of classroom control.

  Children watch teachers in part to learn appropriate adult behavior. If they see ridicule and sarcasm, often they learn to use it themselves. If they hear the language of disrespect, and even cruelty, it tends to show up in their own verbal responses. If, in contrast, they see benevolence and an emphasis on the positive, they may learn to integrate that into their own responses. If they witness fairness, they may absorb the attitude of fairness. If they receive compassion and see it offered to others, they may learn to internalize compassion. If they see self-esteem, they may decide it is a value worth acquiring.

  Furthermore, as Robert Reasoner notes:

  Teachers with high self-esteem are … more apt to help children develop problem-solving strategies than to give advice or deny the significance of what children perceive to be problems. Such teachers build a sense of trust in students. They base their classroom control on understanding, joint cooperation and involvement, working through problems, caring, and mutual respect. This positive relationship allows children to learn and to grow in their confidence and ability to function independently.6

  What a great teacher, a great parent, a great psychotherapist, and a great coach have in common is a deep belief in the potential of the person with whom they are concerned—a conviction about what that person is capable of being and doing—plus the ability to transmit the conviction during their interactions. “I always did poorly in math in school,” a client said to me, “and I always knew I could never do well—until I met a teacher who refused to believe me. She knew I could do math, and her certainty had so much power it was irresistible.” The ability to inspire students in this way is not usually found among teachers who have little belief in themselves.

  Teachers with good self-esteem are likely to understand that if they wish to nurture the self-esteem of another, they need to relate to that person from their v
ision of his or her worth and value, providing an experience of acceptance and respect. They know that most of us tend to underestimate our inner resources, and they keep that knowledge central in their awareness. Most of us are capable of more than we believe. When teachers remain clear about this, others can acquire this understanding from them almost by contagion.

  Sometimes it can be difficult to go on believing in another person when that person seems not to believe in him or herself. Yet one of the greatest gifts a teacher can offer a student is the refusal to accept the student’s poor self-concept at face value, seeing through it to the deeper, stronger self that exists within if only as a potential. (This is accomplished, in part, by making the student aware of choices and options the student had not noted and by breaking problems down into smaller, more manageable units that fall within the student’s present competence and thus give him or her a base on which to build.) A teacher’s own self-esteem can make this task easier.

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