Sham

by Steve Salerno

  The process begins with books like The Rules, which rigidly define “acceptable” mating rituals and promote empty, unfelt gestures—often at the expense of the felt ones—and moves on through the various support groups and Web sites that emphasize emotional reserve while reminding men and women of the gulf in understanding and mutual respect that eternally separates them. How could generic rules that supposedly apply to everyone not take much of the mystery and mystique out of dating? Today, it’s as if the seeker of love is seeking not a person but rather a representative of a certain gender. People learn to look for the stereotype, not the individual, and they relate to one another and respond to one another on that misguided, impersonal basis. Here, more than anywhere else, is where George Carlin’s sly line about the folly of “self-help” acquired from outside the self stands in bold (and comic) relief. Can a person really look outside himself for “rules” on love that are personally, individually relevant and resonant? This shop-manual approach to dating precludes that glorious alchemy between one singular man and one singular woman that produces an enduring, highly individualized coupleness.

  And as SHAM edges away from romance, it edges toward pragmatism. Many young women (including many of the female students I met in my seven years of teaching college) seem to have forsaken any timeless romantic idylls in favor of a much more utilitarian take on the mating dance. Check the tenor of personal ads run by the fairer sex. Increasingly they spend less time effusing amorous whimsy—“Wanted: soul mate for long moonlit strolls”—than laying out specific criteria men must meet in order to establish their fitness for a relationship. Professional and financially secure are terms one sees a lot in such ads. Not that long ago I saw an ad from a woman who lusted for a suitor with “a clean credit report.” This is not to imply that women should seek out unstable bankrupts. But clean credit?

  The simple truth is that no one can orchestrate real love or even honest chemistry. No one can explain why people feel love for those they feel it for. The only certainty is that men and women are going to be drawn to the people they’re drawn to. In SHAM’s defense, some people do make poor choices in affairs of the heart, and many seem to be attracted to exactly the wrong people. (Consider that while in prison, serial killers like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez, Ted Bundy, and even the openly gay Jeffrey Dahmer received cards, smoldering letters, panties, and earnest marriage proposals from adoring women.) SHAM’s relationship gurus try to warn their followers away from making bad decisions in love. It’s an admirable endeavor . . . but does it work? Can it work? By inducing people to embark on relationships that go against their basic wiring, does SHAM not set them up for failure? Will they be happy? If everything in a woman’s system is telling her to find a biker instead of a banker, is her marriage to the banker going to succeed? And can SHAM ever really cure her of her lust for the biker? Is there any reputable evidence of SHAM’s ability to do that?

  Moreover, what are the costs of trying to do that? Of making both genders so overly, obsessively concerned with the process of love?

  “This may sound a bit odd,” one writer who has worked in the Relationships field told me, “but since we’re talking about love and marriage, I’d make the comparison to an orgasm. Especially for a woman, the more you obsess over having one, plan for it, and expect it, the less likely it is to happen. So I suppose you could argue that the very act of planning for love in a mechanical kind of way is what prevents it from happening.” Pausing for a moment, the writer adds, “Come to think of it, it’s the same thing with a man and an erection. You can’t usually will one.” No. And you can’t will falling in love.

  But you can make people cynical and hard-bitten. You can remind them so often of the dangers of finding Mr. Wrong that they second-guess every romantic spark that ignites within them. You can lecture them ad nauseam about the eternal battle of the sexes or the inherent difficulties in cross-gender communication. You can remind a woman nonstop that men really just want to get laid, while reminding a man that women just want to go shopping on his dime. By doing so, you contribute to a climate wherein both genders believe in nothing, trust in nothing. This speaks to the less-than-optimal investment that too many young people have in the relationships on which they embark, even when that relationship is a marriage. Loath to play the fool, they hold back something of themselves in anticipation of a better alternative.

  Today’s young marrieds are infinitely better equipped for life, in the practical sense, than my generation ever was. Ask them about their financial plans for ten or twenty years down the road, and they’ll have a ready answer. Many of them are already laying the proper groundwork for prosperity, or at least a reasonable measure of security. But ask them to picture what their marriages will look like ten or twenty years from now, and you may well get a blank look. Not a few of them will blurt something like “I’m not thinking that far ahead right now. I’m taking things a day at a time.” Some of the people who give that answer will leave a relationship the minute it “stops working” for them. Yet they know enough to hold a tech stock through the market’s cyclic gyrations.

  Susan Allan is the founder and director of the Divorce Forum, a Santa Barbara–based counseling agency and a popular Web site on matters matrimonial. When I asked Allan why we have so much divorce today, she gave a simple answer: “We have more divorce because marriage isn’t based on unconditional love.”

  Nothing ventured, nothing lost. Or so we tell ourselves.

  10

  I’M OK, YOU’RE . . .

  HOW DO YOU SPELL OK AGAIN?

  You can see the glass as half full or half empty. But either way, it’s still half empty.

  —Anonymous

  In contrast to SHAM’s characteristic way of doing things, let’s start with a few objectively measurable facts. Herewith, a sampling of the cheery news from the American educational system:

  National Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) averages were first made available in 1952. Between 1952 and 1963, America’s national SAT score held fairly constant at 478 out of a possible 800 in verbal aptitude, 502 out of 800 in math. This, despite a 400 percent surge in the pool of high-school students taking the SAT. (In the earliest years of the test, only the most motivated students signed up for it. Gradually the SAT became a rite of passage for college-bound students.) In 1963 there commenced an eighteen-year decline in test scores, which, by 1981, had bottomed out at 424 for verbal, 466 for math. In 1982, scores rose for the first time in two decades—by two points in verbal, one point in math. The low test scores have produced a serious kill-the-messenger response, wherein critics blame the test itself.

  In 1998 the Amsterdam-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement released the results of its Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), involving twelfth graders from twenty-three nations. In combined math and scientific literacy, the United States placed fourth from the bottom, ahead of only Lithuania, Cyprus, and South Africa, those historic hotbeds of scientific innovation. In advanced math, the United States outpaced only Austria. In physics, American kids finished dead last.

  Inclined to discount any one study? Here’s another: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked students in thirty-two developed countries. Thirteen countries had better results than the United States in science, fourteen tested higher in reading, and seventeen bested us in mathematics.

  As worrisome as the TIMSS and PISA results themselves were the apologias mounted by defenders of the U.S. system. Dudley Herschbach, a Harvard chemistry professor and Nobel laureate, told the New York Times that maybe we do “let kids wander all over hell in high school, but that preserves some energy for later when it is better spent.” Gerald Bracey, an author and education consultant who has long been an unflinching defender of the beleaguered system in which he works, said the low scores probably showed nothing more than that other cultures are good at teaching their students how to take
tests; U.S. schools, on the other hand, “are nurturing more creativity” in our kids.

  And the rationalizations go on and on. North Carolina’s annual test scores in fourth- and seventh-grade writing competency were so low in 2002 that district officials did what any of today’s self-respecting education administrators would do: They threw out the scores. “We don’t have any confidence in the results,” explained Phil Kirk, the chairman of the state board of education. Note that Kirk blamed the results, not the schools or the curriculum. In any case, more than half the state’s fourth-graders failed the writing test. Districts in Texas and Florida, equally embarrassed by their children’s scores, ditched the results as well.

  In fairness to Kirk, Bracey, et al., one could proffer several explanations for why test scores have fallen, particularly when it comes to declines in verbal fluency. As a people, we don’t speak as formally as we once did. We’ve gotten lax, careless. We have presidents who, in delivering major policy speeches, say “ain’t” and “nu-cu-lar,” and we have had vice presidents who spell potato with an e at the end. We’ve also incorporated into mainstream expression increasing amounts of street dialect (think Ebonics) and other linguistic corruptions. Hollywood has further reshaped the culture. Can America really expect kids growing up with Goodfellas and 8 Mile to diagram sentences written in the queen’s English? Moreover, American schools contain an ever-larger population of immigrant children whose parents are disinclined to give up their native tongues.

  Fine. Forget about the verbal. How about math?

  What sinister social influences are causing kids in droves to multiply 5 by 7 and get 43? In what culture or country does 19 minus 14 equal 8? Granted, verbal skills play a role in every aspect of education, so language barriers (be they cultural or semantic) will affect the quality of learning. But we see the same problems, the same dour long-term trends, in relatively homogenous school districts, where everybody, including the teacher, speaks pretty much the same brand of English—or Spanish or Tagalog. And then you have the nettlesome fact that some of the highest achievers (including, year after year, finalists in the National Spelling Bee) are the children of recent immigrants. If language is such a barrier to education, how do we explain that?

  Or could it be that such immigrant kids come from homes where the emphasis is “You’d better learn your ABCs” instead of “Now how do you feel about yourself today?”

  The reference to children’s feelings is not made in jest. In fact, no discussion of the problems that plague our education system can ignore the self-esteem movement, which gained respectability nearly four decades ago and has become a guiding force in America’s schools. It’s doubtful that any major cultural movement has been bureaucratically endorsed based on flimsier evidence—or been responsible for more disastrous results—than the attempt to imbue American schoolchildren with self-esteem.

  “So many of the ills associated with the current malaise in public education can be associated, to a greater or lesser degree, with the emphasis on students’ egos and feelings over their academic progress,” Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University and a leading critic of America’s overselling of self-esteem, told me. “Overwhelmed by pressure to be nurturing, to feed the students’ emotional selves, educators are forgetting their basic mission. And we’ll be paying the price for that for decades to come.”

  As we’ll see, the self-esteem movement in schools was yet another outgrowth of SHAM. As the modern self-help movement exploded in the late 1960s, more and more Americans began focusing on their own feelings, taking the cue from author/psychiatrist/SHAM guru Thomas A. Harris and asking themselves, “Am I OK?” Given Harris’s premise that many people are “not OK” precisely because they were somehow damaged in childhood, it was only natural that some “experts” would turn their attention to how to prevent such damage in America’s children.

  The result of that campaign—the rethinking of America’s grade-school system in a way that undercut its commitment to quality education—offers one of the clearest and most instructive lessons in how SHAM’s failings can hurt us all.

  FORGET PERFORMANCE—FOCUS ON FEELINGS

  It’s been observed that there are two ways to guarantee high scholastic performance. The first is to expect a great deal from students and implement systems that force them to live up to those expectations. The problem here is that some kids won’t make the cut. They’re going to feel left out; indeed, they may be left back. That will hurt their feelings, take a toll on their social lives, and, we’re led to believe, haunt them forevermore.

  That brings us to the second way of guaranteeing performance: Simply set expectations so low that no one fails. And tell kids to be happy with the results.

  Silly as that sounds, in recent years the latter “method” has become a popular strategy (if not the operative strategy) in American schools. Instead of encouraging excellence, educators have decided to banish failure by defining it out of existence—while at the same time persuading America’s schoolchildren that they are automatically special, wonderful, brilliant.

  Thanks to the emphasis on self-esteem, our schools now give ungraded tests (that is, when tests aren’t forgone entirely); are plagued by the outer-limits degree of grade inflation known as “grade creep”; ban most competitive games during gym class or even recess periods; and, above all, replace hard-core, carefully planned, historically documented curricula in math, English, and the sciences with touchy-feely, free-form, ad hoc exercises and “play activities” meant to teach students how to “make nice.” If they teach anything at all.

  Gone, for the most part, is the open posting of grades, which would humiliate those who failed tests or even those who didn’t do as well as some peers. In jeopardy of a similar fate, at least in some educational precincts, are verbal classroom exercises, which of course can highlight the student who is unprepared or less skilled in a given subject. Educators who openly display any behaviors or attitudes that compare students unfavorably to their classmates can expect a talking-to from on high. This is not to say that teachers should be permitted to force students to sit in the back of the room wearing dunce caps. We’ve come a long way since such draconian measures. But how does a teacher motivate higher performance without first calling attention to a student’s substandard performance? And, of course, the teacher who gives his dressing-downs in private leaves himself open to charges of harassment from resentful students.

  Even favorable comparisons hold hidden danger. Hailing some students as examples of excellence in open class can make other students feel inferior.

  It’s not hard to see how this leads to less quality work. The superior student is denied the opportunity of having his or her work praised, with all the positive feedback such praise provides; the rest of the class is deprived of peer role models. Policies at many “enlightened” schools go so far as to discourage educators from tolerating “teacher’s pets,” thus putting teachers in the unwelcome position of having to blunt the natural enthusiasm of their most motivated, upbeat pupils. (Apparently we don’t care all that much about the good students’ self-esteem.) If the choice is between (a) having a small group of students stand out in a way that makes the rest of the class feel bad or (b) having the entire class perform in a uniformly mediocre but collegial way, many schools would opt for (b).

  In all this, the focus—as in most areas where self-help has done its dirty work—is on feelings over thoughts, intent over outcome, contentment over productivity. School districts have methodically disconnected pride from performance. As John K. Rosemond, a developmental psychologist and a syndicated columnist, has observed, in an Alabama elementary school where reading scores are abysmal, students walking through the front door each morning see their reflections in a mirror overhung by a banner telling them: “YOU ARE NOW LOOKING AT ONE OF THE MOST SPECIAL PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!”

  It doesn’t end there. Consider a typical lesson plan in self-esteem building, cul
led from an idea-swapping Web site that helps teachers “more meaningfully connect” with their classes. The theme of the lesson, posted by Bonnie Custer of St. Agatha School in Portland, Oregon, is “feeling flashbacks.” Custer employs a “cooperative learning structure” called “Mill and Mingle” to enable students to share feelings and build a sense of community. After reminding prospective users that her lesson should not be used until “these feelings have been discussed and modeled,” Custer lists the requisite materials for this lesson: “. . . cards with Feelings (for visual learners), tape recorder or record player, music appropriate for grade level, space to move around freely.” Thus prepared, students segue into the Mill and Mingle activity itself, which goes like so: “While music plays students circulate through classroom. When the teacher stops the music, they form pairs by turning to the person closest to them. The teacher calls out a feeling (use cards, also, as cue for visual learners) and the pair shares with each other a time when they have felt that way.” Custer suggests as some possible feelings “happy, angry, embarrassed, lazy, scared, frustrated, shocked, loved, proud, important, curious, pleased, bored, disappointed, upset, joyful, sad, surprised, terrific, alienated, ashamed, worried.” She also recommends that teachers have students identify similarities and differences in feelings shared and then “write about this experience of shared feelings in their journal.” The process, Custer says, should be “repeated several times.”