The Me Diploma

Campus Report ^ | July 28, 2009 | Malcolm A. Kline

[bs9021]

The Me Diploma

by: Malcolm A. Kline, July 28, 2009

When international test scores came out showing that American students scored lower on standardized math tests than Koreans but felt better about themselves, statisticians scratched their heads. It turns out that the Yanks may actually have been living up to what they were trained for.

“In a recent study, 39% of American eighth-graders were confident of their math skills, compared to only 6% of Korean eighth-graders,” Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell report in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. “The Koreans, however, far exceeded the U. S. students’ actual performance on tests.”

“We’re not number one, but we’re number one in thinking we are number one.” It doesn’t get much better as the kids age.

“Total self-esteem has not increased among high school seniors, but 3 out of 4 report they are satisfied with themselves, up from 2 out of 3 in 1975,” the authors report. “One out of 3 now say they are ‘completely satisfied,’ versus 1 out of 4 in 1975.” But is this enhanced self-imaging based on much more than the Wizard of Oz can give?

Moreover, is it any more genuine than that beloved fictional character? “U. S. high school kids have not improved in academic performance over the last 30 years, a time when self-esteem has been actively encouraged and boosted among American children,” the authors observe. “According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 17-year-olds’ math scores have risen slightly, from 304 to 307, but reading scores have stayed completely flat at 285.”

“So, at best, there has been less than a 1% improvement in academic performance.” Nevertheless, in giving out grades, educators apparently opt for hope and change...

[The_Reader_David]

St. John Cassian listed self-esteem in his catalog of the Eight Grevious Vices—the others are familiar to Western Christians as the Seven Deadly Sins. Those of us who teach mathematics at the university level are perpetually given examples of why he classified it as a vice, thanks to our K-12 education system that actively inculcates the vice without teaching much mathematics.

[DainBramage]

American kids are completely confident in the calculators made by Korean kids’s parents.

[the_devils_advocate_666]

In a survey taken several years ago, all incoming freshman at MIT were asked if they expected to graduate in the top half of their class. Ninety-seven percent responded that they did.

[3niner]

Oddly enough, this actually makes sense. For most MIT students, they never met anyone smarter than themselves, until they went to MIT, so they were extrapolating from experience.

I have personal experience that relates to this. I went to CalTech (just slightly harder to get into than MIT).

I scored 800 (a perfect score) on the SAT Math. It was a bit of an eye opener when I saw that 1/3rd of my fellow Freshmen had done the same, but I was still better than average, right? What I still didn't realize was that everyone else had gotten an almost perfect score, and had simply made one or two careless mistakes.

In high school, I studied more math than anyone else in the history of my school district. Shouldn't that have put me ahead? Well, not exactly. My school district had never sent anyone to CalTech or MIT before, and they didn't know what math subjects were most important (besides I had to do independent study, because nobody was qualified to teach the extra math). In the math most important at CalTech, I started out in the bottom 10 percentile. That was more than an eye-opener, it was a shock.

[Do the math]

Many of the kids today are delusional prima donnas with unrealistic expectations of reality. The coming bad economic times is going to teach these kids the real value of self-esteem. It will not be pretty.

[Niuhuru]

I went to my commmunity college for counseling on what courses I needed to take to get a degree in Virology and they started going on and on and on about getting a degree and then enrolling in university.

Of course, they never understood that I was seeking more in depth knowledge.

Reason number four I never went back.