Posted on 04/06/2015 10:34:13 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Something that should give would-be education reformers pause but probably won’t: when ephemeral education fads finally come in for much-needed criticism, they have already done their damage. Case in point: the self-esteem courses popular 15-20 years ago.
“Raising it in isolation was counter-productive,” Martin West, an associate professor of education at Harvard said at the Brookings Institution on March 31, 2015. West is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.
He was chairing a panel on “Incorporating noncognitive skills into education policy.” “Education is very faddish and there’s a danger that the fads will catch on and have unintended consequences,” Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, on the same panel, said.
For his part, Whitehurst avers that schools should stick to “noncognitive skills” such as “making eye contact, being polite and dressing appropriately.”
“A whole field of behavioral psychology is devoted to changing things that are unbelievably hard to change,” Chris Gabrieli, a lecturer at Harvard said. Gabrieli is also co-founder and chairman of a group called Transforming Education. Interestingly, Garibaldi finds that the non-cognitive skill most likely to guarantee future success is self-control. He cited a study of students in Dunedin, New Zealand that pretty much came to that conclusion.
What makes that finding particularly ironic is that it tracks with the urgings of Eighteenth Century philosopher Adam Smith.
I wish there was a little more meat in this article.
People don’t need self-esteem; they need self-respect.
The two are not synonymous.
William James once wrote - the context was educating the young: “Society does not experiment with its young.” He was making the point that the young could be harmed by the experiment. Now, the chief aim of educational theorists is to experiment. If it harms the young, that is the acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of progressivism.
These same “self-esteem” proponents also tried to teach my sons that it was a bad thing to defend yourself from an another aggressive individual who attacks you. Anyone defending themselves would suffer the same punishment as the instigator, normally in-school suspension. I taught my sons that self defense is a virtue, not a vice.
In effect, at the same time, they were teaching kids that you are important, wonderful and great, but you are not important, wonderful and great enough to justify defending yourself and avoiding potentially serious injury.
There is no end to the evil of the left.
I have a vile, obnoxious, evil brother-in-law who is absolutely full of self-esteem AND self-respect. It’s beyond the rest of us as to how he could be so proud of himself and think he’s so much smarter than everyone. I can only attribute it to satan-induced blindness.
Let's ask an expert:
Full hearts. Empty heads.
Dr. William Coulson has spent years trying to put out the fire he started when He assisted in the development of self-actualization programs foisted upon public schools.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/12301-humanistic-psychology-in-the-schools-part-2
Sounds to me like he’s got no self-respect.
well they’re full of something.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” The second table of God’s Holy Law. It begs the question as to what constitutes a proper self-love. Self-control has *got* to be part of it, because love and discipline go hand in hand. Christians are given to understand these things to a large degree, but struggle with it as does all mortal flesh. If your brother-in-law is baptized and under the discipline of a church/local parish you may want to gently remind him of the attributes of Christ, into whom he is baptized. If he does not care at all about such things, your attribution is most likely correct, for it is characteristic of satan-induced blindness to avoid anything that has to do with repentance and faith in Christ.
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