I'm not a big fan of faculty meetings, but there was one shining moment back when I was teaching at Illinois. One of my squishier colleagues was going on and on about how we should build our students' self-esteem, which prompted one of my more curmudgeonly colleagues to ask "what have they ever done that was estimable?" Heh.
I was reminded of that moment while watching CNN's Jack Cafferty interview Steve Salerno, author of the new book Sham, which takes on the self-help movement:
SALERNO: ... for example if you're in the school system now, simply by chanting every day, "I am special, I am wonderful" that somehow --
CAFFERTY: I love it.
SALERNO: It doesn't matter that you add 2 and 2 and get 19. You know this is something that has become pervasive in society.
CAFFERTY: Which has happened. Tell me about the S.A.T. scores; since we changed our approach to teaching these little darlings that they're really all 24-karat princes.
SALERNO: Yes it used to be, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I think it was 28 percent of students used to go on from high school to college with "a" and "b" averages. Now it's 83 percent of students. S.A.T. scores have gone down 35 points on average. During one particular period between the 1970s and 1995, at the same time that kids were getting better grades. What we've really succeeded in doing with the self-esteem movement is we've completely -- we haven't made kids any better; we've just made them think they're better .... We've completely detached measurable objective performance from their own notions of how good they are at something.
