Making kids feel good.

The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, by Maureen Stout, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2000. 313 pp.

MAUREEN STOUT'S important new book contains a quotation from Winston Churchill that encapsulates the essence of her argument. Churchill is quoted as having said, "Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested." And they almost certainly never will; nor will Presidents. It is a power that extends to all who teach, and it goes unchecked, given the relative positions of student and teacher in the classroom. Education is about power, and no one understands this better than Stout. Education is about the power that teachers have, which is inordinate; and it is about the power that students are supposed to acquire as a result of their education. The latter is a power over themselves, which results, or should result, from the development of their minds as they gradually acquire the ability to make informed, autonomous choices: a power that results in positive human freedom.

Ironically, if Stout is correct, the power that teachers have at present rules out the likelihood that students will ever achieve the power that will set them free. This is because teachers, and schools of education, have been wedded for at least half a century to the foolish notion that students, all students, regardless of their ability, are extraordinary. This is what Stout calls the "self-esteem" movement, and as she takes great pains to show, it is anathema to genuine education.

In her carefully documented argument, Stout demonstrates how devastating this movement has been to America's system of public education, from kindergarten through college. She has no fear of overstatement or hyperbole, for she can exclaim that "the self-esteem movement has caused an intellectual earthquake of such magnitude that its aftershocks will continue to reverberate throughout our schools ... unless we take swift action to stop it."

However, the likelihood that "swift action" will be taken is practically nil, given the evidence Stout draws on to show how tightly the movement has American public education in its grip, as well as how defensive those in schools of education tend to be. Having bought into a fiction and allowed it to work its way deep into their consciousness, teachers in our public schools do not take lightly attacks against their sacred shibboleths. K-12 educators, almost without exception, are convinced (for no good reason) that if they simply tell Suzy and Fred that they are wonderful, they will perform to the highest possible standards in school.

Now there is an element of truth in this myth, and it is this element that has caused most of the harm. The evidence that has been built up over the years by people sympathetic to the self-esteem movement has, ironically, failed to show any correlation whatever between praise and performance. But common sense tells us that praise is a good motivator. The problem is that our teachers are being taught to heap praise on their students for no good reason. The students know they will be praised simply for breathing: they do not have to do a thing! There is simply no evidence to support this extreme view of the efficacy of praise. At some point, students must be required to perform. That is, teachers must have high expectations of their students, students must make an effort and risk failure (from which they can learn a great deal), and praise must come at the end, even if the results are meager. If Stout is correct, our schools have bought wholesale into a doctrine that has it all backwards: praise is the effect of accomplishment, not its cause.

Some years ago, when the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" was still appearing, Irecall a series of episodes in which Calvin was explaining to Hobbes that he has discovered the secret to success: simply lower the bar far enough, and behold, one has already reached all of one's goals! How funny. And how sad. Calvin may feel great about his "accomplishments," but he will never learn anything; he will never grow. Calvin, of course, is a typical student in our schools. He has not learned anything, but he feels good about himself, because he has been told so often how wonderful he is. And that, apparently, is good enough for our teachers, because that is the focus of our present educational system. This student will not learn anything, but he or she will be promoted to the next grade ("social promotion" Stout calls it) and eventually will graduate. Many such students--more each year--go on to college, where as many as half will be forced to do remedial work in mathematics and in English.

We have known that there was a serious problem in our schools at least since the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983. This document was dismissed as "conservative" (and therefore not worthy of serious attention: so much for our openmindedness as an academic community), because it was written during the Reagan Presidency. Be that as it may, the figures revealed in this "political" document are sobering. American students showed up poorly when compared with students in other industrialized nations. For example, American students failed to come in first or second in any of nineteen academic tests, and they came in last seven times. The Commission noted that the achievement of American high school students on most standardized tests was lower than it had been when tested a quarter century previously, and that many seventeen year-olds do not possess the "higher order" intellectual skills necessary to write a persuasive essay or to solve a mathematical problem involving several steps.

While one may quibble about the objectivity of the testers, there have been enough follow-up tests conducted by respectable groups to corroborate the main conclusions of the Commission's report. And those of us who teach in higher education have enough anecdotes about the under-preparedness of our students to fill books.

Typically, however, when this topic comes up, those who man the battlements of our education schools simply bury their heads deeper into the sand. Like self-esteem promoter John Vasconcellos, when told that self-esteem "theory" is weakening our childrens' minds, making them slaves to the latest fashion or the most transparent demagoguery, they will reply blithely, "All the research in the world won't change my mind about it." This attitude is reflected in a recent report in The Chronicle of Higher Education which noted that faculty in virtually every major academic discipline except education complained that their students were seriously under-prepared for college-level work.

Maureen Stout operates from inside the educational establishment, holding a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles, and having taught for years in the Education Department at the University of California at Northridge. Her argument has the ring of truth to it, and carries considerable weight. She has seen close-up how tenaciously educators cling to this self-esteem nonsense and how it destroys the minds of the young who are subjected to it. She makes a strong case that it leads directly to narcissism, or to the preoccupation with self; separatism, or loss of a sense of community and the eradication of what Aristotle called "civic virtue"; emotivism, or the rejection of all truth and value in the name of "feelings"; and cynicism, or the view that nothing really matters.

In addition, Stout insists, the self-esteem movement is directly or indirectly responsible for the dumbing down of the curriculum at all academic levels, grade inflation, loss of motivation on the part of the taught and of many teachers, a broad and pervasive sense of entitlement among students generally, political correctness, the "culture wars," and rampant anti-intellectualism in our schools. Yet, without the ability to think, what kind of future do these young people have? And what kind of future does our democracy face when it is peopled by mis-educated students whose only claim to be taken seriously is that they feel good about themselves?

How did this come about? To answer this, our author recounts how the self-esteem movement grew out of the side of progressive education and has given birth to a number of myths that now pervade the schools and control the thought of our teachers. Myth #1 is that "High expectations for students are damaging to their self-esteem"; Myth #2 is that "Evaluation is punitive, stressful, and damaging to self-esteem"; Myth #3 is that "Teaching and learning must always be 'relevant' and student-centered"; Myth #4 is that "Effort is more important than achievement"; Myth #5 is that "Competition leads to low self-esteem and should be replaced by cooperation"; Myth #6 is that "Students should be promoted from one grade to the next, irrespective of achievement in order to preserve their self-esteem"; Myth #7 is that "Discipline is bad for self-esteem and should be dispensed with"; Myth #8 is that "Teachers should be therapists [or best friends with their students]"; Myth #9 is that "It is the teacher's, not the student's responsibility to ensure learning"; and Myth #10 is that "Feeling is more important than thinking."

Stout sees the self-esteem movement as nothing less than an assault on reason, which, after all, "protects civil society from deteriorating into barbarism and chaos." Further, it is an attack on the classical ideal of a liberal education that teaches young people "meta-cognitive skills," the ability to think about one's thinking and to learn how to learn. All of this, she insists, is the result of fifty years of telling students that they are terrific just the way they are, telling them "they are good for no good reason." As Stout notes, "confidence comes from experience. That is the basis of true self-esteem: knowing what is possible and achieving it." I would take it one step further and paraphrase John Stuart Mill by saying that we do not know what is possible for our students to accomplish until we ask them to do the impossible. Surely Stout is correct: we have sold our students short and they have delivered as promised. It is not the students' fault: we are at present lying in beds of our own making. It will take a gargantuan effort to rise from the bed and make things right by our young people. It will take a revolution in thinking on the part of educators and a sustained effort by parents to get involved in their children's education.

It is sad to think that Stout's book, like so many fine books written about education, amounts to little more than "preaching to the choir," since there is precious little genuine dialogue among educators. Those who need to read this book probably will not. The book will almost certainly never become required reading in our schools of education, and it will be ignored by parents looking for a good read in the self-help section of their favorite book store.

This is not to say that the book is without faults. It is annoyingly repetitive and at times a bit frenetic as Stout seems determined to convince us that the self-esteem movement has caused every problem in our culture. But these flaws are simply the measure of the author's sincerity and genuine distress over what is, truly, a serious problem. She is convinced that there is something terribly wrong in our schools of education; she is convinced that she has found the cause; and she is willing to suggest the cure. This book should be read by every teacher who really cares about his students' well-being, and by every parent who is, in the end, a child's truest educator.

HUGH MERCER CURTLER is Professor of Philosophy at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota, and author of five books including, most recently, Recalling Education (2001).