Students, red pens, and the State of a Nation

[T]he obsession with self-esteem ultimately undermines real education. When the self-esteem movement takes over a school, teachers are under pressure to accept every child as is. To keep children feeling good about themselves, you must avoid all criticism and almost any challenge that could conceivably end in failure. In practice this means each child is treated like a fragile therapy consumer in constant need of an ego boost. Difficult work is out of the question, and standards get lowered in school after school. Even tests become problematic because someone might fail them.

In Dr Jean Twenge’s 2007 book, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - And More Miserable than Ever Before, the case is clearly made for dumping the self-esteem movement in schools. Dr Twenge argues that most of these “programs encourage children to feel good about themselves for no particular reason” and that the research shows no relationship between high self-esteem and academic achievement, the ability to have harmonious relationships, and so on.

Indeed, numerous studies have found little or no connection between all these self-esteem programs and any positive academic performance. As but one example, “In 2004, 48 per cent of American college freshmen - almost half - reported earning an A average in high school, compared to only 18 per cent in 1968, even though SAT scores decreased over the same period.” Indeed, college entrance exams are being dumbed down while high school grades are being artificially inflated.

And employers are complaining about the recent crop of students entering the workforce. They are often illiterate, lacking in basic work skills, poorly motivated, and have an overly high estimation of themselves and what they have to offer the workplace.

Self-esteem is hard to come by in a meaningless world

But perhaps the final word can be given over to the question of worldviews. It seems to me that one’s worldview will make a great amount of difference to one’s self esteem. If our worldview teaches us that we are simply a cosmic accident with no meaning or purpose, no history or destiny, no significance or value, then yeah, blowing your mind on drugs or committing suicide may seem like a pretty good idea.

Worldviews matter and bad worldviews lead to bad consequences. As one commentator puts it, “Perhaps it is no wonder that there is a problem with self-image today when children and students are taught they are only animals (as biology teaches) or machines (as behaviorism teaches), or who exist only for pleasure and sex (as hedonism teaches), or for money (as crass materialism teaches). Where do people find inherent dignity and value if they are only end products of an ugly and impersonal process of materialistic evolution?”

It seems we could go a long way toward improving students’ self-image (and academic performance) if we freed them from the straightjackets of naturalism, materialism and anti-supernaturalism. Giving kids the awareness of something greater, grander, and more mysterious than only themselves might do their fragile egos a whole lot more good than chucking out all of our red marking pens.