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One might ask, is this really what kids go to school for? Shouldn’t teachers spend more time actually teaching? According to some experts, no. “Healthy kids can teach themselves what they need to know,” writes Grace Llewellyn in The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Such attitudes once motivated Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to observe, “Children need to learn, not teach.”
In some schools, standards have fallen so low that simply showing up is treated as a real achievement. In one Long Island, New York, school district, a program rewarding “perfect attendance” was bastardized to the point where a student could qualify by showing up in class for any given period of three consecutive weeks. A student who achieved that modest benchmark got not just a commemorative award—but free pizza, too!
Another teacher told me about his middle school’s “Happy Board,” where students advertise milestones of significance to them: “Some of the stuff that gets posted is surreal. ‘I’m a woman now. I got my period.’ ‘You should see my dad’s new SUV!’ That kind of thing.What does that have to do with the school? Or even true self-esteem, for that matter?” The teacher’s school also features occasional assemblies during which the student body gets to stand up, en masse, and applaud itself.
If the goal of such activities is to promote self-esteem, how do educators imagine the students will fare once they enter less coddling environments? After all, when they eventually enter the workforce, the Long Island students won’t be feted with pizza parties or earn raises for managing to show up at work for three straight weeks. And the children who are taught to stand up and cheer for themselves “just because” might one day encounter situations their egos have not been conditioned to handle, or where the criteria are fixed and inflexible. Not too many med-school registrars’ offices worry about hurting candidates’ feelings.
It’s as if school administrators and teachers believe that merely by having life happen to them all students earn the right to feel self-esteem. That diminishes the worth of the genuine self-respect that comes from having applied one’s self to a true challenge. “The mechanism of self-esteem,” John K. Rosemond told me, “is that you faced up to a task that, at least to you, was of uncertain outcome. You don’t feel real self-esteem unless you’ve tackled something you didn’t necessarily know you’d be able to master when you first undertook it.” Getting your period or just observing your father’s new SUV in the driveway hardly qualifies.
What’s odd here is why so many educators would assume that high expectations automatically destroy children’s self-worth. Thanks to the film Stand and Deliver, featuring a sterling performance by Edward James Olmos, many Americans are familiar with the work of Jaime Escalante, a teacher who pushed his class of inner-city academic discards to remarkable performances—in calculus, no less. But there’s another story that, though less well known to the public, has become legendary in education circles (indeed, several people I interviewed for this book mentioned it without prompting). It’s the story of a Chicago public-school teacher named Mary Daugherty.
One year, the story goes, Mrs. Daugherty found herself confronted by a class full of sixth-graders who were so clueless and intractable that she suspected many of them had learning disabilities. So one day, while the principal was off the premises, she broke a hard-and-fast rule: She looked in the file where student IQ scores and other relevant data were kept. Daugherty was amazed by what she found: Most of her students had IQs in the high 120s and 130s—near-genius level. One of the worst offenders had an IQ of 145.
Mrs. Daugherty did a great deal of soul-searching that night. She concluded that the blame for their conduct and lackluster performance was hers and hers alone; she had lost this class of brilliant minds by boring them with low-level work. So she began bringing in difficult assignments. She upped the amount of homework and inflicted stern punishments for misbehavior. By the end of that semester, Mary Daugherty had engineered a 180-degree turnaround: Her class was one of the best behaved and most accomplished in the entire sixth grade.
Impressed—and, frankly, stunned—the principal asked Mrs. Daugherty how she had managed such a dramatic turnabout. Haltingly she confessed her secret raid on the IQ files and how it had changed her approach to teaching the class. The principal pursed his lips, smiled, and told her not to worry about it. All’s well that ends well, he told her.
“Oh, by the way,” he whispered as she turned to retreat to her classroom, “I think you should know: those numbers next to the kids’ names? It’s not their IQ scores. It’s their locker numbers.”
One reason Jaime Escalante and Mary Daugherty remain exceptions is that social pressure makes it difficult to hold kids accountable for actual learning. New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, learned this firsthand in January 2004 when he announced his plan to hold back third-graders who scored in the lowest of four levels on citywide math or English tests. The plan would end the common practice of “social promotion,” which essentially passes children along to the next grade regardless of whether they’ve mastered the competencies taught in the previous grade. Critics railed against Bloomberg, many of them viewing social promotion as an important means of ensuring self-esteem, since it prevents kids from feeling like losers as they watch their friends ascend to the next grade. Iowa state senator Maggie Tinsman was similarly attacked in 2003 when she spearheaded legislation to halt the social promotion of Des Moines grade-schoolers in order to stress to schools the importance of reading. “If we are ‘the education state,’ ” argued Tinsman, using a tagline popular among Iowa’s boosters, “we must very strongly say, ‘yes, we want every child to learn to read.’ ” Tinsman’s critics denounced her remarks as “harsh” and even “racist.”
Some states have proposed “conditional grades,” a sort of between-grade limbo, where underperforming children go until they can join their peers at the next level up. Descriptions of such programs typically include counseling support and other expensive incidentals. The budgetary impact of these plans is significant: $30 million a year for Des Moines, as much as $1 billion for New York City, by some estimates. Such are the lengths to which we’ll go to avoid bruising the feelings of kids who can’t—or won’t—do their work.
“The term ‘self-esteem’ has an almost incantatory power these days,” writes Mike Schmoker, an elementary-school teacher, in Education Week. “Every discussion in education takes a bow in its direction.” To educators, says Schmoker, self-esteem is “less a quality to be slowly earned than one quickly and easily given.”
For more than seven years I have taught college, mostly to upperclassmen, and I can testify to the prevalence of the same easy, lowest-common-denominator thinking, even among students competing for a place in today’s Darwinist job market. Students who’ve been awarded a B-minus—for work that merited less—will come to your office in tears. They are products of an educational system (and, indeed, a society) that has conditioned them to think they’re entitled to be shielded from the ignominy of being “second-rate.” And if they somehow get less than that, it’s somebody else’s fault: the teacher’s, the system’s, the school’s. Not theirs.
Of course, before someone can get a really good job, it helps to get into a really good college, which is why grade inflation has reached down to high school as well. Figures from the College Board, which oversees the SAT, document this decay. In 1972, when data first began to be collected, 28 percent of college-bound seniors reported having an A or a B high-school average. By 1993, 83 percent had an A or a B average. During this same period, the average SAT score fell by thirty-five points. Again: lower achievement, better grades.
This may also create a fractious climate at home by driving a wedge between students who are essentially majoring in self-esteem and parents whose notions of a quality education are not quite so laissez-faire. At school, little Samantha is told she’s unique, special, wonderful. At home, Mom and Dad don’t understand what Samantha has done that’s so special or wonderful, especially when she just came home
with a math test on which half the answers were wrong or an essay full of terrible grammar and misspellings.
“Why can’t you be nice to me like Mrs. Rosenberg!” yells Samantha, on the verge of tears. “I’m never good enough for you!”
To which the hapless parent replies, “But honey, three times five isn’t nine.”
“So? The teacher said it was a good effort! Why can’t you ever be happy with anything I do? Why can’t you be happy with the fact that I’m trying?”
Faced with these situations, California, Michigan, and other states have allocated funding for programs designed to teach the parents how to better relate to their underperforming offspring and thus not dissipate all that heady smoke being blown at school.
The nonstop emphasis on safeguarding the student’s self-esteem is such that teachers—already an underpaid, embattled group that we should be trying to support and ennoble—feel even less positive about their jobs, finding themselves at the mercy of arbitrary rules and ambiguous policies that may end their careers, or worse. In school districts nationwide, teachers can be fired for offenses against their students’ self-esteem—and then, on that basis, sued by the parents of the sulking child. One San Diego school district maintains a code of ethical conduct for teachers that bizarrely prohibits them from “actions and/or activities that in any way might cause a student to feel bad about himself or herself respective to their [sic] peers.” A new hire might reasonably ask, And exactly what does that exclude? If anything?
“The standards are so broad that they could be read to prohibit just about anything and everything,” a twenty-year New York City teacher told me. “It’s an eye-of-the-beholder thing. If the student ends up feeling bad, you did something wrong.” Rightly, he asks, “I don’t mean to whine, but I’m a credentialed professional who’s been doing this for two decades. I care about my students, and I take pride in my job. Where is the concern for my self-esteem?”
HOW DID WE COME TO THIS?
It’s safe to say that the impetus for the academic self-esteem movement came straight from Napoleon Hill and the other SHAM impresarios who preached, Believe it, achieve it. But many influences coalesced into what we see in today’s schools. The leaders of the self-esteem movement borrowed freely from the available rhetoric. They created a garish patchwork of unproven theories and inconclusive data, using whatever small shreds of material helped their cause while discarding the large bolts of tightly rolled fabric that didn’t fit their free-form patterns.
Amid the counterculture fervor of the 1960s, radical-chic behavioral theorists began fretting about how America was forcing orthodoxy down its students’ throats, worrying too much about their math skills and not enough about their souls. But these theorists also argued that if we showed students we cared about them more as people, they would begin to add and multiply like little Einsteins.
Through self-esteem, in other words, we could have it all!
Pressed on the subject, many of the early gurus invoked turn-of-the-century education pioneer Maria Montessori. Montessori’s clinical analysis of children’s learning habits led her to endorse a form of passive education wherein children taught themselves about life by interacting with their environment. After becoming Italy’s first female physician in 1894, Montessori returned to college to study psychology and philosophy. She became a professor of anthropology in Rome, then abruptly gave up both her university chair and her medical practice to work in close quarters with a group of sixty children. In 1907 she founded her famed Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House, incubator of the so-called Montessori method of education. She first visited the United States in 1913 and won quick support from such American notables as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Helen Keller. By the 1960s Montessori-style education had caught on with progressive, high-minded suburban types—the “station-wagon Socrates set,” as an editor friend of mine called them. At around this same time, of course, the nascent self-help movement was exhorting each of us to search for a “personal truth” (supposedly) free of orthodoxy-enforcing strictures.
A watershed event occurred in 1970. Theodore Sizer, then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, together with his wife, Nancy, edited an enormously influential critique of current educational methods titled Moral Education. The Sizers condemned just about everything identified with the cultural values communicated via the American educational system: from the frontier ethic to the McGuffey Readers to the hierarchal classroom to any “performance metrics” (grades, to you and me) that sparked “terror” in the hearts of young students. The Sizers propounded a “new morality” that prized, above all, students’ rights and inherent beliefs. In this brave new world of ethical relativism and the democratized classroom, “teacher and children can learn about morality from each other,” the Sizers explained.
Moral Education made discussions of self-esteem and student empowerment de rigueur in teachers’ lounges and especially at major educational confabs. Soon self-esteem became a sufficiently weighty topic to justify its own conferences: A February 1986 gathering in San Jose, California, begat the National Association for Self-Esteem (NASE). (Among the key players at the landmark California Self-Esteem Conference was Jack Canfield, who went on to write and edit the homespun, best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series.) Five years later the NASE board got around to defining the subject of its existence: “Healthy self-esteem” was “the experience of being capable of meeting life’s challenges and being worthy of happiness.” Today the organization promotes such books as The Feelings Storybook, described on the NASE Web site as “a sensitive and heartfelt book for children of all ages, including the child within each of us. . . . The Feelings Storybook provides an expansive vocabulary for the developing reader and acts as an excellent assessment tool for emotional growth.”
The explicitly bracketed “self-esteem movement” dovetailed nicely with a second phenomenon, “affective education,” which emphasized subjective psychological growth (“Who am I?” “What do I really want in life?”) over cognitive learning (“Never mind who I am or what I want; can I do simple arithmetic?”). Since its formal 1975 debut with a personal-growth program called Quest, affective education has flourished wildly, with about three hundred such programs now being marketed to U.S. school districts. Some popular ones include Pumsy (Pumsy being the program’s green dragon mascot), DUSO (Developing Understanding of Self and Others), and Free the Horses. In general these programs are not actually part of the curriculum; instead, trained facilitators work with groups of children in an assembly-hall setting or even off campus. Corporate sponsors or civic groups such as Kiwanis or the Lions Club often pick up the tab.
Affective-education proponents were near-manic about avoiding the preachiness that tends to characterize attempts to sell a values-based curriculum. Thus, by its very nature, and to some extent by design, affective education undercuts the participant’s belief in moral absolutes. Hoping to empower children and solidify their notions of self, most such programs teach them to make decisions based solely on personal criteria: “Would this make me happy?”
Here, for example, is how an affective-education facilitator might frame a discussion of armed robbery (and this is not an exaggeration):
If you rob a bank, yes, you may come away with a sizable sum of money.
But there’s a high probability you’ll get caught and go to prison for a spell.
And you may have to hurt some folks in the bargain.
Hurting other people may make you feel bad.
Plus, prison is not an especially nice place to be.
So you’ll want to carefully weigh your feelings on robbing that bank.
The question of whether it’s simply wrong to rob a bank—and/or hurt people—does not figure in the equation. In fact, affective-education trainers are specifically warned against introducing their own “value judgments” into the class discussion.
It’s not hard to see how affective education’s moral neutrality would
irk parents whose ethical goals for their kids are somewhat loftier. (That is, if parents even know the specific content of these programs. After all, who is going to object when little Johnny comes home with a circular announcing a “program to boost your child’s confidence and self-esteem”?) Even some of the early advocates of affective education have recanted. One of its founders, W. R. Coulson, PhD, has admitted that he might have made a costly mistake in pushing affective education. “Youthful experimentation with sex, alcohol, marijuana, and a variety of other drugs has been shown to follow value-free education quite predictably,” he lamented.
Coulson is right. For example, when researchers at the University of Southern California compared students placed in affect-oriented drug-education programs with students receiving no such education, they found that those enrolled in the “preventive” program increased their use of tobacco by 86.4 percent, alcohol by 42.4 percent, and marijuana by 74.2 percent.
BUT AT LEAST THEY’LL FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES—WON’T THEY?
Self-esteem is one of those things we make reflex assumptions about—that is to say, we assume it’s a good thing. But scant evidence exists to show that self-esteem really is good for children. It may even be bad for them.
To begin with, young children probably do not understand the emotions that all this feel-good blather is supposed to foster within them. A well-meaning newspaper reporter visited a New Mexico school whose self-esteem program had children begin the day by chanting:
I feel good about me
I feel good about me
Me is something