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.
The "Gods of the Copybook Headings" will sort this out in their own good time.
Thank you, Mr. Kipling.
Just like not all of today’s kids are what this article describes.
Oh baloney.
There’ve been plenty of narcissistic jerks in every generation. And said jerks have never been more so that at about this age. This is like the whining of the ancient Romans and probably Egyptians that the younger generation is a bunch of spoiled, lazy punks.
“”The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”
-Socrates, 5th century BC “
It *ALL* comes down to the parents.
Plus, as happened with plenty of “my” generation, a few years in the real world will straighten ‘em right up. All but the truly stupid ones, anyway and the stupid ones are stupid be it ancient Sumaria and will be in the 25th century.
I immediately recognized it, and check, and yep, it's Bob. I was a native Rochesterian, and he's better on the radio. His message, when he is writing, is still stellar.
But his style sucks.
Because he writes like this.
In short sentence fragments.
Which mostly annoys me.
A lot.
Around Halloween one of my co-workers had her daughter (1st grade, maybe 2nd) at work after school and I asked her what she had learned in school that day. She said they learned about recycling pumpkins.
And the Greek states FELL. First to Alexander in Socrates time, and then to Rome.
wait until America has her back to the wall in a grim and terrible World War—a war we can lose and face slavery from a tyrannical foe. Then the young people of today will be forced to pick up their burden, rededicate themselves and rise to the occasion. It will happen—but before we can learn to win—lots of folks are going to die.
To hear that.
I didn't know.
I'll try to avoid it.
In the future.
;^)
(But your confident optimism is a good and important thing.)
The problem in America?
The biggest problem?
The problem associated with editorial writers?
Bob Lonsberry.
Because he writes like this.
Not on every sentence, mind you. Sometimes, he will lapse back into a more normal writing style, and string sentences together wirth better form — even creating a whole paragraph, amazingly!
But then he goes back to this.
Because he’s Bob Lonsberry.
Too funny..
He demonstrates part of the problem...
Short quick sound bite sentences, make it more palatable for his readers, which have short attention spans.
Me thinks the Japanese and Asian communities, in general, do not fit into his thesis. Abundance of self esteem does not seem to be part of their value system.
In general, I do agree with him..
I like this short sentence thingie do-bob..Cool !
In the company I work for employee evals are rated:
Exceeds expectations
Meets expectations
Fails to meet some expectations
Fails to meet most expectations
Our manuals stats clearly that Meets is a good rating and and that Exceeds should only be noted when employee rises way above and beyond yada yada...
The offshore goobers (a country over between Pakistan and Thailand) and the under 25’s get angry when they do not get Exceeds in every category.
I tell my own kids on scales from 1-10 I never give a 10 unless you were absolutely perfect and a 9 is almost as hard. If I give you a 7-8 on something (like a sports performance) that was good.
I can’t speak to Hesiod, but Socrates and Peter the Hermit were actually deadly accurate, and should not be dismissed as simply proving every culture feels this way:
Immediately following Socrates’ statement, the Athenian Republic fell to a coup. Democracy was re-established, but Plato was citing him in a warning that this democracy could not last, and he was correct.
Peter the Hermit led the “People’s Crusade” against Islam, but was dismayed at what rabble he had attracted. (Although, I’m not familiar with the exact quote, and the date it’s attributed to is about a century after Peter the Hermit’s death.)
Very few boomers were hippies, so don’t over generalize. I and very many like me have been working at least since we were 16, served in the military, many as a career, educated ourselves and have worked hard to try to give our kids a solid start in life.
Unfortunately, many (not all) of our kids go for the National Socialist Democrat Party give aways and vote democrat. Not the way they were raised and many are hard workers and responsible parents; they just don’t understand history, what socialism is, or the Constitution and the freedoms that are being removed.
Yeah, many of the boomers who were hippies and socialist agitators are now in high positions in government and industry. They had the time, the family money, the notoriety, the sponsors to worm their way up the ladders while the rest of us worked to make a better life.
We never considered ourselves to be special, at least not like some of our worthless co-boomers and many of our offspring but of course we will be blamed for the sea of $h!t that they and their democrat stars create for us all.
When it all falls apart, remember that your generation voted for this in large numbers.
Short recap for those not familiar with the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” .... it doesn’t end well.
The poem was published a year after the end of The Great War.
I tell my own kids on scales from 1-10 I never give a 10 unless you were absolutely perfect and a 9 is almost as hard. If I give you a 7-8 on something (like a sports performance) that was good.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
It must be an ‘age’ thing.
In ‘my Navy’ of the mid 50’s-mid 60’s, while a 4.0 was perfect for evals (believe there were 5 categories) and the ‘good working types’ would get a 3.6 or so (average) while the ‘kiss arses were around 3.8’ 3.9/4.0 meant someone was lying, either the person doing the grading or the subject was an outstanding kiss arse.
Fast forward to my local VFW in the 90’s, some young wave (E5 or E6) was bemoaning the fact she ONLY got 4.0 and was afraid she wouldn’t get promoted....Just talking to her and from her outward uniform appearance, it was hard to imagine here getting 3.0’s etc....
Actually very few of us were. And a miniscule number of us attend Woodstock which may surprise many in the news media. I was working construction in Indiana during the summer of 69 and didn’t even know about Woodstock until I got to college.
Parenting 101 is to tell your children that they’re crap (because, initially, they are), and make them prove they’re not crap, while still letting them know they’re loved. It always works.
Laz,
We have not been formally introduced but your reputation precedes you with a degree of aplomb and bombast, an overflowing cup of mendacity and more than a smidgen of licentious fever all wrapped in a high dudgeon of estimability. How do you do it? Curious readers want to know.
Lou
And I would say don’t generalize yourself about the youth vote.
My generation is largely conservative/libertarian, at least 50/50. I don’t think the generation behind us votes as liberal as you think. Most I deal with are fairly libertarian. At least in the midwest anyway. If you’re in an urban area or the coast, I imagine they vote no more or less liberal than preceding generations.
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