Thomas Sowell wrote an article two days ago, Smart 'Problems', in which he decried the inability of our schools to maximize our nation's intellectual capital by putting more effort and resources into teaching Gifted children. Sowell commented that part of the problem is our current emphasis on "self-esteem" at the expense of education:
High potential will remain only potential unless it is developed. But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators -- and some are absolutely hostile to the idea.
It violates their notions of equality or "social justice" and it threatens the "self-esteem" of other students.
He further commented:
If developing the high potential of some students wounds the "self-esteem" of other students, one obvious answer is for them to go their separate ways in different classrooms or different schools.
Lack of [teacher's] competence is only part of the problem. Too often there is not only a lack of appreciation of outstanding intellectual development but a hostility towards it by teachers who are preoccupied with the "self-esteem" of mediocre students, who may remind them of what they were once like as students.
Betsy Newmark is a High School teacher (and her blog should be a must read for anyone with children in the educational system). She addresses Sowell's complaint that there is a lack of competence in those who choose to go into teaching in her post from Wednesday at Betsy's page.
At least for secondary school teachers, you could crowd all the education stuff that you need on lesson planning and discipline into one class. Then spend the rest of the time learning your subject. If I were a principal, I would try to avoid people who had been education majors and look for majors in the discipline to be taught. Unfortunately, the system is set up for just the opposite screening device. You can't get certified if you haven't taken the education courses even if you have a doctorate in the subject. If you're lucky, you can get a lateral entry job and then spend your first year teaching, the most stressful year, taking all sorts of extra education classes.
I would add that Betsy doesn't think too highly of education classes.
Then Sowell returns to one of his common complaints that the gifted in college avoid becoming education majors. Perhaps that is because education courses are the stupidest courses I've ever had the ill fortune to take. And education research is the weakest and least scientific that you can imagine.
Neither Sowell nor Newmark are in a good position to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire self-esteem movement which has been undermining our educational system for too many years. Self-esteem regulation, as practiced in our schools, represents an almost complete misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept. I have written quite a bit about the developmental line of self-esteem and self-esteem regulation. In a post on Self Esteem and Homeostasis, I commented:
This is where so much of our current pedagogy and the entire world of PC fails most dramatically. Children can tolerate losing; they know when another child is better at sports or math or spelling than they. A healthy child is not defeated by this but learns what he or she is able to do, and can do their best. The PC victimology in speech codes on so many campuses is worse than nonsensical; any person whose self esteem is damaged by cross words, is an individual with exceptionally fragile self esteem. The so-called Self Esteem movement has things exactly backwards. People do not achieve self esteem by never being hurt; they maintain their self esteem in the face of disappointments and hurts.
In my four part series on Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia, I described some aspects of the development of healthy self-esteem, and how this development can go awry with unfortunate consequences. The idea that our schools can repair damaged self-esteem is at best questionable, and in the unusual case in which teachers can elevate one's self-esteem, the techniques involved are essentially the opposite to what is typically suggested. In Part III of my series, I offered a brief recap:
I have described in my earlier posts in this series how healthy narcissism develops and showed how it supplies the person with a deep seated conviction that he can be an effective agent in obtaining what he needs from the external world, that he has intrinsic value to himself and others, and that he has a reasonable expectation of a life lived close to his ego ideal. Such a person has inherent resiliency for the vicissitudes of life and is able to withstand setbacks and failures that all of us must face from time to time.
When a child grows up with a mother who is poorly able to offer her child unconditional love and an adequate, empathic mirror (which a the child needs in order to make sense of his own inchoate affective states and experiences and develop a stable image of himself) it makes it extremely difficult for him to develop an image of himself as a person who has anything of value within himself.
A depressed mother, a deprived mother, an immature mother, a drug addicted mother, or a narcissistic mother, (not an exhaustive list) typically has a limited ability to respond to the needs of her child because her needs remain primary. (I do not mean to imply that any child born to a depressed mother, or a substance abusing mother, is doomed. The complex interplay between the child’s inherent disposition and constitution and the quality of his nurturing, from parents, siblings, and other significant people, will ultimately determine his psychological status; to paraphrase Richard Feynman in another context, character development is non-computational.)
The person with reasonably healthy self-esteem enhances his self-esteem (feels good about himself) when he accomplishes difficult tasks, or pleases his loved ones, or succeeds in a quest; enhanced self-esteem is based on real accomplishments. Those whose self-esteem is less well developed rely on, indeed require, the external world to constantly feed their need for approval. Thus, telling a damaged child that 2+2=5 is "terrific work" is not only ridiculous but does nothing to help the child develop a more realistic appreciation of their own strengths and abilities. If anything, it encourages the child to learn to never trust his teachers, who can so obviously be cowed into giving "A's" whether deserved or not (grade inflation is endemic throughout our educational system) and in the worst case scenario, that those who "dis" you are fair game for assault, whether on a personal "street" level or by more sophisticated assaults through the legal system.
Until our educational system rediscovers that its mission is to educate kids, not make then feel better, we will end up with an uneducated populace who think they are more competent than they actually are. And that is a prescription for social disaster.