Sham

by Steve Salerno

  It is very good to be

  When the reporter asked one child, “How does it make you feel when you say that?” the boy first crinkled up his face as if not understanding the question. Then, under prodding, he replied with visible agitation, “I don’t know. It’s just something they make us say. Like the pledge of allegiance.”

  This should surprise no one, because researchers themselves don’t even seem to know what self-esteem is or precisely how it figures in human development. The NASE, remember, took five years to produce a definition of self-esteem that in essence reduces to the tautology “self-esteem means feeling good about yourself.” The broader field of psychology continues to debate the concept and its real-world implications.

  “There is simply no consensus on what self-esteem even is,” Paul Vitz, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, told me. “There have been thousands of psychological studies on self-esteem. Often the term self-esteem is muddled. It becomes whatever the person doing the study wants it to be . . . a label for such various aspects as self-image, self-acceptance, self-worth, self-love, self-trust, et cetera. The bottom line is that no agreed-upon definition or measure for self-esteem exists.”

  In scholastic settings, even the most basic correlations you’d expect—between being good at something and feeling good about something—may not exist. A 1989 study of mathematical skills compared students in eight different countries. American students ranked lowest in mathematical competence. Korean students ranked highest. But the researchers took an added step: They asked the students to rate how good they thought they were at math. The same American students who fared so poorly on the objective portion of the test had the highest overall opinion of their math skills. The Koreans, who aced the test, were their own harshest critics. “The best way to develop real self-esteem in children,” Michael Hurd told me forthrightly, “is to teach them how to think.”

  OK, but if self-esteem isn’t helping kids become students, at least it should help them become better, happier citizens. Right?

  Not necessarily. Albert Bandura, a psychology professor at Stanford, concluded on the basis of an extensive multiyear study that self-esteem has little or no effect on either personal goals or skill-based performance. Pointing to his colleague’s study, Vitz says, “There is no evidence that high self-esteem reliably causes or prevents anything, good or bad. A lot of people with high self-esteem have caused quite a lot of trouble for society.”

  Roy Baumeister, of Case Western Reserve, goes further than Vitz, actually positing a causal relationship between high self-esteem and destructive behavior: “It turns out that many hit men, genocidal maniacs, gang leaders, and violent kids have high self-esteem, not low self-esteem, which is the typical association some people have automatically tended to make.”

  As Martin Seligman asked in “The American Way of Blame,” an essay for the APA Monitor, “In the last year there has been a cascade of multiple murders in school by American boys. In the 1950s there were none. What changed?” Certainly society itself changed in myriad ways, but Seligman argued that the “inner world” of these children has changed as well. As he put it, “They’re taught mantras like, ‘I am special,’ and some of them come to believe it. A surefire recipe for violence is a mean streak combined with an unwarranted sense of self-worth.”

  John Rosemond agrees that teachers and parents who embraced the “liberate the children” view may have badly underestimated the potential barbarism of children who are not given a directed moral education. Left untouched by civilizing forces, the “self” for which this new view of education wants you to feel “esteem” may not be worthy of it. “To be honest,” he told me, “I don’t think there’s been any profession that has wreaked more damage on the culture than psychology.”

  Even psychiatrists who pooh-pooh the notion that America may be raising a generation of homicidal maniacs have their own concerns about self-esteem as it’s presently taught in schools and embraced by too many doting parents.

  “One of my pet peeves is to hear parents praising kids’ accomplishments as if they’re professionals,” Ralph López, a Manhattan pediatrician, told me, describing a phenomenon he calls “overindulged child syndrome.” “A child who draws very well is a ‘wonderful artist,’ a child who dances well is a ‘great dancer.’ Praise the event, certainly—what the child did—but don’t label the child himself or herself. All you do is fill them with unrealistic expectations.” López says that “kids who have had too much positive reinforcement don’t do as well in the workplace. They’re overdue for a crash landing.”

  If you want to see this phenomenon at its outer limits, check out each season’s early episodes of American Idol, when Simon, Randy, and Paula gleefully separate the wheat from the chaff. Note the way rejected contestants further humiliate themselves by expressing outrage after rendering a performance that failed in every way. It speaks to a culture in which all of us, steeped as we are in I’m OK—You’re OK, behave as if we think everything we do is OK. Says Vitz, “People brought up on that mentality have come to believe that society’s standards and criteria are not nearly as important as the way we see ourselves.”

  Is this really what we want? Is this the kind of blind, mindless sense of self that America hopes to stoke in its young?

  THE BIGGEST LITTLE VICTIMS

  If self-esteem-based education has been a dismal disappointment overall, it has been an unqualified disaster for one group of students: boys. Far from nurturing confidence, the currently entrenched pedagogy has taught America’s boys and young men to question their own worth. It does this by rewarding qualities boys typically lack—docility, emotionalism, sensitivity—and punishing qualities they’re more likely to possess: competitiveness, outspokenness, stoicism. Ironically, despite its determination to downplay winning and losing, the self-esteem movement, by privileging introspection and sentiment over action and intellect, naturally sorts the genders into winners (girls) and losers (boys).

  Martin Seligman has written powerfully of the self-esteem movement’s “frightening” impact on America’s young men, and he’s not alone. In a May 2003 Business Week cover story titled “The New Gender Gap,” Michelle Conlin wrote of a “stunning gender reversal in American education. From kindergarten to graduate school, boys are fast becoming the second sex.” Nor do boys have any real choice in the matter; the only alternatives are dropping out or being banished. As Leon Podles, author of The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, lamented to Karl Zinsmeister, editor of American Enterprise magazine, the educational system countenances boys only “if they will agree to behave like girls.”

  Significant numbers of them say “no thanks”—particularly those from the lower-income families for whom education offers the best prospects of breaking the cycle. “Among kids in families earning $80,000 to $100,000 per year, girls are 8 percent likelier to be on a college track than their brothers,” says Podles. “At family incomes of $10,000 to $20,000, the skew swells to 56 percent.” Using U.S. Department of Education numbers, Business Week’s Conlin points out that by 2010 there will be 142 women receiving bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men; by 2020 that ratio could be 156 women to every 100 men. Conlin runs through some other startling statistics: “Once a boy makes it to freshman year of high school, he’s at greater risk of falling even further behind in grades, extracurricular activities, and advanced placement”; boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school; and more than 70 percent of special-education students are boys.

  Three decades ago, just as self-esteem-based education was gaining favor, educators rightly recognized that girls weren’t learning as well as they could be and sought to close the gender gap. Conlin, referring to the “Girl Project” that resulted, writes, “The movement’s noble objective was to help girls wipe out their weaknesses in math and science, build self-esteem, and give them the undisputed message: The opportunities a
re yours; take them. Schools focused on making the classroom more girl-friendly by including teaching styles that catered to them.” But while the gender gap has indeed narrowed, the attempt to make the classroom friendlier to girls made it unfriendly, if not openly hostile, to boys.

  As a result of schools’ turning away from competition and traditional expressions of masculinity, a visitor to almost any American lower-grade classroom over the past generation was apt to see the class busy at activities like painting, quilting, and journaling. If the visitor happened by during recess and observed the children at structured play activities, those activities were apt to be free-form games where no score was kept, no high-fives were permitted, and no individual player was hailed as a “star.” Schools don’t want to hurt the feelings of all those who don’t excel, especially when boys are bigger and stronger than many of their female peers. Engaging in stereotypically male activities—especially war games, but also far milder chest-thumping ones—often draws severe chastisement. This has been particularly true since the Columbine massacre, as schools seek to identify and short-circuit students’ aggressive tendencies.

  School administrators have gone beyond curricular changes to achieve their aims. In 2002 the Seattle public school system required hundreds of middle-school students to participate in three days of sensitivity seminars at which they were repeatedly challenged to bring their feelings to the surface and share experiences when they hurt others. One student, interviewed in the Seattle Times, called the seminars a “psycho cry fest”—not an inappropriate description, considering that in some meetings up to half the students were weeping.

  But according to John Rosemond and others, schools’ attempts to “deprogram” gender can have the opposite effect on young boys. Teachers serve as parental surrogates, entrusted by parents to teach their children all day, and in today’s educational environment, too many boys lose their bearings and act out in a destructive manner. For evidence of this counterintuitive reality, one need look no further than the sad plight of our inner cities, where male role models have long been absent, and boys grow up in households run by women. As Karl Zinsmeister has put it, “All those rap anthems about raping and torturing women come out of a world wholly devoid of male control.”

  More and more research indicates significant biological differences between the genders that have a profound effect on behavior. Researchers tell us, for instance, that by the sixth week after conception, a male embryo’s blood contains at least three times as much testosterone as a girl’s (anywhere from 250 to 500 nanograms per deciliter for boys versus 25 to 75 nanograms of testosterone for girls). As a boy’s life progresses, additional infusions of testosterone are linked to increased propensities for risk taking and a willingness to fight. Nevertheless, explained Leon Podles, it remains impolitic to discuss notions of gender-identified traits, and countenancing them in a classroom setting has become “politically incorrect to the point of being a firing offense.” Hence the “genderless classroom.”

  Politically incorrect or not, recognizing gender differences could prove critical if boys are to overcome the problems they currently face. In the June 2000 issue of the American Enterprise, Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, wrote, “If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the characteristically different interests, preferences, and behaviors of males and females are expressions of innate, ‘hardwired’ biological differences, then their differences in emotional styles will be difficult or impossible to eliminate. But why should anyone make it his business to eliminate them?”

  In Britain, where boys are also struggling academically compared to girls, some educators have hit upon the answer to Sommers’s question: They shouldn’t try to eliminate gender differences but instead should react to those differences. As Sommers recounts, a council of British headmasters devoted almost a decade to studying successful classroom programs for boys and concluded not only that the focus on students’ self-esteem was hindering educational achievement but also that the emphasis on supposedly gender-neutral “creative” assignments was doing a disservice to male students. “Boys do not always see the intrinsic worth of ‘Imagine you’re a sock in a dustbin,’ ” the headmasters advised. “They want relevant work.”

  AN UGLY RECORD

  Since the self-esteem movement made its mark in schools, America’s students have not shown significant progress. Quite the contrary.

  In recent generations, America’s young have performed steadily worse on standardized tests. During the past two years, two separate analyses, one by Jay Greene, an education researcher, and one by the Business Roundtable in affiliation with Northeastern University, have suggested that the nation’s official statistics severely undercount the number of high-school dropouts, and that the actual rate may be as high as 30 percent instead of the 11 percent quoted by the U.S. Department of Education.1 Far too many of those dropouts are males, who may then go on to figure in two further sets of statistics—the unemployment rate and the prison population. The nonstop emphasis on feelings and self-worth has given us two groups of students, one consisting of those who do not feel appreciably better about themselves, and one consisting of those who perhaps feel a little too good about themselves and their rightful place in the universe. (In any case, few young people seem to have achieved that happy balance the self-esteem vanguard no doubt envisioned.) It is also clear that schools have done children no favor by essentially trying to extend the coddling “womb experience” throughout their educational years. Such students too often emerge woefully unprepared for the cold realities of postscholastic life. Like the broader SHAM phenomenon out of which it grew, the self-esteem movement not only has failed to deliver on its promises but, in at least some respects, has wrought the exact opposite of what was intended.

  Maybe we need to rethink our emphasis on feeling good, before there’s precious little left to feel good about.

  11

  PATIENT, HEAL THYSELF

  Modern health quacks are supersalesmen. They play on fear. They cater to hope. And once they have you, they’ll keep you coming back for more.

  —Stephen Barrett, MD, and William T. Jarvis, PhD, Quackwatch

  SCENE 1. On September 3, 2001, Larry King gave over his acclaimed CNN talk show to psychic and best-selling author Sylvia Browne “for the full hour,” as King likes to say in touting A-list guests. Already celebrated among her disciples for reuniting the bereaved with long-lost relatives and diagnosing the unspoken upheaval in marriages, Browne lately had turned her attention to a more basic type of diagnosis: telling people what ails them. Her performance on King’s show that night was classic. Undeterred by her lack of any formal credentials except a master’s degree in English literature, Browne used medical terminology freely, and sometimes even correctly. She told one caller to “check your bilirubin,” a hemoglobin by-product Browne misdefined as a liver enzyme. She recommended that another caller test herself for Epstein-Barr disease by analyzing her solid waste (even though the medical literature neither sanctions nor even mentions any such test). She used the words embolism, hemorrhage, clot, and stroke pretty much interchangeably, and at one point sounded as though she were prescribing the drug Tegretol, an anticonvulsant/painkiller with potentially life-threatening side effects, for a caller—something people bereft of medical licenses cannot, by law, do. Nonetheless, King seemed impressed, and viewers who got through no doubt felt truly fortunate, inasmuch as Browne usually charges $700 for telephone health readings.

  SCENE 2. Debbie Benson’s death in July 1997, at age fifty-five, punctuated a sixteen-month quest to avoid traditional medicine at literally any cost. The previous March, her first mammogram in almost a decade had revealed a small breast tumor. Though she agreed to a lumpectomy, Benson refused all conventional follow-up. Instead she consulted a succession of dubious healers who emphasized the medicinal power of positive thinking and prescribed oddball tinctures and salves. (One of them liked to check for the spread o
f cancer using a magnetized pendulum.) Even as Benson’s condition deteriorated, the fringe practitioners to whom she’d entrusted her life continued to warn her away from conventional health care. When Benson’s body began to shut down, her naturopath blamed not the questionable treatments, or even the rampant cancer, but the patient herself. Debbie, it seems, had “given up” and was no longer marshaling enough “positive energy” to beat back the rogue cells ravaging her body. Though diagnostic hindsight is unreliable, Benson’s close friend of three decades, Ken Spiker, remains convinced that more aggressive mainstream treatment might have saved her life, could have prolonged it, and certainly would have eased Debbie’s suffering at the end. “Her official diagnosis was cancer, but she was really a victim of quackery,” Spiker told me.

  If the first scene provides a quick snapshot of America’s latter-day ardor for health-care “choice”—as we’ll see, yet another illegitimate child of the self-help movement—the second one provides a vivid snapshot of the associated risks.

  “FAITH HEALING FOR THE MASSES”

  In a survey of thirty-one thousand U.S. adults released in May 2004 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which operates under the aegis of the National Institutes of Health, 36 percent of respondents admitted to using alternative medicine in some form during the previous calendar year. When the various permutations of “therapeutic prayer” were added to the list of alt-med options, overall usage shot to 62 percent. A whopping 75 percent of respondents said they had turned to alternative medicine at some point in their lives. An earlier study on the subject, reported in November 1998 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that Americans spent $27 billion out of pocket on unconventional therapies in 1997, and that between 1990 and 1997, alt-med use rose 47 percent. By the latter year, the total number of patient visits to all types of alt-med practitioners—at 629 million—easily eclipsed the 386 million visits to traditional primary-care physicians.