BTW, as a fervent student of the English language, I will add this:
Posted on 12/11/2012 6:03:06 AM PST by shortstop
The chickens have come home to roost.
The first generation of students swaddled in the insanity of the self-esteem movement have emerged on the scene as arrogant, self-absorbed twits with an exaggerated sense of entitlement and self-importance.
In short, they’ve been spoiled. Potentially, they’ve been ruined.
The idiocy of social engineering in the classroom is again bearing catastrophic results.
Here’s how we know. A group of five university professors has evaluated more than 16,000 personality profiles of college students gathered over the last 24 years. What they’ve discovered is that today’s young people have dramatically different self-concepts than the two generations which preceded them.
And the differences aren’t good.
Today’s college students are monumentally more narcissistic. That means they worship themselves. That means they’ve been told that they’re special so many times that they’ve come to believe it. In blunt terms, they think their crap doesn’t stink.
But it does. Possibly more than most.
Because one of the hallmarks of an inflated self-concept is personal failure. People who think they are superior have an uncanny tendency to be inferior. Their sense of worth is so high they have no motivation to work and improve themselves. When you think the world is yours on a silver platter, it never occurs to you that you’ve got to get off your backside and earn anything.
The study shows that children born after 1982 have a unrealistically inflated self-concepts. So high is their estimation of themselves, in fact, that they are fully narcissistic – a trait that is somewhere in the gray area between a character flaw and a personality disorder. Narcissism is such an unhealthy aberration that it is almost a mental illness.
And the self-esteem movement of the 1990s has made it epidemic.
Unfortunately, the education industry has become so divorced from reality that for several years the conventional wisdom in American classrooms has been that children – particularly poor and minority children – fail to achieve because they have negative self-concepts. The way to correct that, the argument has gone, is to pump up their self-concepts through self-esteem building. That typically translated to unrealistic and unearned praise for students, and the removal of all negative feedback and consequences from the classroom. That’s why grades are artificially high, everybody gets a smiley face and teachers don’t use red ink any more.
Schools seem incapable of recognizing that true self-worth comes from doing what’s right and from legitimate achievement. Not praise passed out like candy, but genuine achievement coming as the consequence of significant effort. You earn worth, it isn’t given out for free.
The lunacy of the education reformers was matched by the leniency of the troubled homes. Mom and dad have forgotten how to be mom and dad. Children were waited on hand and foot with no obligations of their own to work or assist the family. Permissive parenting and failed educating led to a bumper crop of egocentric creeps.
And that’s going to hurt.
Because narcissists typically fail. They fail in their responsibility to be good citizens and they fail in their responsibility to be good spouses and parents.
Being a good citizen and being part of a family requires selflessness. They require putting your own interests second to the interests of something larger and more important than yourself. To the narcissist, there is nothing more important than yourself.
That leads to employment and self-reliance difficulties, and to significant challenges to the ability to maintain a marriage and raise a family.
Which bites society hard. Society needs this crop of young adults – like every crop of young adults – to assume its responsibilities as the taxpayers and the parents of the future. Each rising tide needs to shoulder its burdens and leave its mark. Failure to do that can have huge sociological consequences.
This crop has been weakened in its abilities to bear off those responsibilities by the warped worldview its education and upbringing gave it.
So what can be done?
The self-esteem crap can end. Though it is so entrenched and unquestioned, and protected by political correctness, that it is unlikely to go anywhere.
Young people must learn – with the help of others – that the world doesn’t revolve around them, and that believing it does is the quickest way to a miserable and disappointing life.
The social and religious values of the United States – and of decent nations all around the world – teach selflessness and service. Those values must be re-enthroned and the self-worship of the narcissism-breeding self-esteem movement must end.
Hinge it to a goal.
You want to get into college? Don’t write your essay all about yourself and how wonerful you are. Gear it to the educators who will be reading it. They like kids who love learning. Tell them what you want to learn.
Get the kids’ heads to turn around that way if you can.
Or the same with getting a job: Don’t talk about your qualifications and your paltry experience. Tell them what you know about their company and how it’s the place you want to work and why.
Kids are taught that it’s all about them for so long that they find it hard to make the switch. When you’re looking for something, a college education or a job, you’ve got to turn it around.
My generation is largely conservative/libertarian, the youth vote showed itself to be largely democrat. I know what my kids, their friends in the 20-35 yo groups believe in and it is not conservative by a long shot when it comes to how they vote. I also see it in the older student (25-40) population where I teach.
Too many potential conservative voters in those groups as well as my own generation simply did not vote for whatever ignorant reasons. I didn’t care much for Mitt or the way he handled the campaign but he was a far better choice than four more years of the would-be dicatator.
Agree completely. I am talking about kids that are 11-12 years old, who know what the scores of games are and, to their credit, often comment on the fact that the “trophies” mean nothing.
Even when they were 5-6 years old, my sons and daughter knew what the score was at the end of their games; again, the libtard utopia of “equal outcomes” thwarted by human nature and reality...
Simple. Spend 12 years on a website, consistently and obsessively posting, day in and day out, like a twitchy overnervous sweating mole-rat who's overdosed on crack and high-caffiene-content coffee.
11 years will not cut it. It has to be 12.
BTW, as a fervent student of the English language, I will add this:
I don't recycle pumpkins. I re-use them.
I process them through a thermal-mechanical device, which renders the pumpkin into a brown slurry. The brown slurry is then processed with other biological materials in a different thermal-mechanical process to a solidified brown cake. That brown cake is processed through an animate biological re-forming system, then flushed down a pipe into an underground bio-degradation system, from which it emerges as an aqueous solution of nitrates. That solution is finally disposed of in the environment, where is supports the growth of various species of the family Poaceae.
That depends on your POV. Vultures, rats, and cockroaches like terror and slaughter ...
bm
Laz,
I know you did/would. I anticipated your erudition and perspicacious talents.
Actually I’ve been around about 14 years. I signed up about 6 months into the birth of FR but lost my initial login info, changed it, whatever.
I was Amos the Prophet for years but decided with help from Jim to take off the mask. Now I am me.
I enjoy your posts and appreciate your candor.
As for a reputation I am not exactly reserved but have not caught the wind that you have found.
Lou
Glad to meet you after all these years, sir!
The gladness is mine, FRiend. Perhaps notoriety has not followed me here due to my failure to develop friendships. I count you one.
Delightful! Glad I can count you as a friend!
And by the same token, not all kids today are worthless self-important slackers. Stop trashing them because of stupid articles like this.
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