THE EDUCATIONAL DISASTERS OF COUNTERFEIT SELF-ESTEEM

For over three decades, education's "self-esteemers" have run the show, distorting education's mission from one of teaching basic skills to one of hiding incompetence while "feeling good" about oneself. Authentic self-esteem, based on genuine learning, remains central to education growth. But for thirty years, we have gutted rigorous, traditional educational subjects and practices in favor of making students "feel good," regardless of actual accomplishments.

Matthew Robinson of Investor's Business Daily reported on three decades of artificially "feeling good," and what he found was very disturbing. Robinson quotes Martin Covington, an author and educator who studied a number of programs and found a "generally low magnitude of association between self-esteem and achievement." And examination of over 200 studies on self-esteem by psychologists Roy F. Baumeister and Joseph Boden of Case Western Reserve University and Laura Smart of the University of Virginia offered an even more frightening and ominous conclusion: " ... people turn aggressive when they receive feedback that contradicts their favorable views (of themselves)" and " ... it is mainly the people who refuse to lower their self-appraisals who become violent."

Remember that the counterfeit "self-esteem" crowd has been crowing for decades that low self-esteem can be blamed for everything from poor grades to violent crime. Studies now show that exactly the opposite may be true. Deliberately inflated levels of bogus self-esteem, levels not supported by any objective acquisition of skills, may in fact be the cause of a considerable amount of violent behavior. Remember that these conclusions came not from the result of one study, but form a survey of over 200 studies.

Robinson reports that fourth-grade California math teachers are told "not to judge the rightness or wrongness of each student's answer. Let those determinations come from the class ... Avoid showing any verbal or nonverbal signs of approval and ask, "Does everybody agree?"

You can easily establish one important objective measurement of the effects of spending thirty years and untold billions of dollars trying to raise unauthentic "self-esteem" levels. In math alone, a study involving 12 nations revealed some truly disturbing results. By every objective measuring criterion, American students ranked last in math. Dead last. But guess which students ranked first in how they felt about their math skills? Right. The Americans, who finished last in the actual demonstration of skills, ranked first in their opinions of themselves and their math abilities. Conversely, the South Koreans ranked their own sense of self-esteem nearly at the bottom of the list, but came in first in the objective tests. If you're looking for the legacy of the California math book that advises the teacher not to comment on whether students have gotten the right or wrong answer, you just found it.

When times change rapidly, the last thing we need is a herd of educator-lemmings telling us that competition and assessing knowledge by using objective tests should be eliminated in favor of "feeling good." the real enemy for those promoting fraudulent self-esteem is competition in any form, and they know it. They just won't admit it. Those misguided teachers and theorists who lack the courage to take a stand and teach what students really need to learn can find the cause for their students' failure and dangerous "self-esteem" very easily. All they have to do is look in the mirror.

George Roche is president of Hillsdale College, which receives no federal funding and is located in Michigan.