NOTE:
This document is made up of three articles. This document is presented to you in support of the position I have long advocated to students in my classes: if you want self-esteem you must work for it. It does not come from simply saying good things about yourself to yourself, because always remember "words are cheap." Therefore, if you work for higher educational achievement, then you will have a higher self-esteem (which in turn will encourage you to maintain your high educational achievement) In other words: there is a dialectical relationship between achievement and self-esteem. 

The joke goes that a painfully self-deprecating man marries a woman who thinks the world of him. His new wife tells him constantly how intelligent and handsome he is. She points out his successful career and his many friendships. One day, the man tells his wife that he's leaving her. Stunned, she asks, "But why?"

And he answers: "I'm too good for you."

If only self-esteem were really that amenable to therapeutic intervention. But it is one of the quirks of human nature--and by now a cliche among therapists--that the very things that cause us the most pain are often the things we cling to most stubbornly. And what could be more fundamental than the way we think about who we are?

Two new books take on that question, and call for a definition of self-esteem that is at once intrinsic and dynamic. Both level harsh criticism at the quick antidotes offered by the self-help books, tapes and affirmation-a-day calendars churned out by the self-esteem movement.

"Low self-esteem has been accused of being at the root of everything from poor grades and poverty to serious crime and drug addiction," says William B. Swann Jr., PhD, author of Self-Traps: The Elusive Quest for Higher Self-Esteem (W.H. Freeman, New York). "A lot of these self-esteem programs raise false hopes that ignore the fact that self-esteem is deeply rooted in the fabric of our belief systems."

Swann and his colleagues at the University of Texas, Austin conducted a study that showed that people with negative self-views, when offered the choice, chose to hear negative, rather than positive, evaluations about themselves. Conversely, and probably not surprisingly, people with positive self-views chose to hear positive evaluations. So strong was this drive for self-confirmation that people with low self-esteem actually preferred to hear the negative evaluation rather than opt to be in a different experiment.

"We crave stability even if it means pain," says Swann, who has studied concepts of the self for more than a decade. "The desire for predictability, control and coherence is so powerful that it overrides what all of us know to be the fundamental desire for positivity."

Are these people really that dumb and ugly? Could it be, as Freud suggested, that a person with such harsh self-views "has come pretty near to understanding himself"? Some research in the "depressive realism" school seems to indicate that individuals who are mildly to moderately depressed see themselves more accurately--that is, closer to outside observers' assessments--than do people who are not depressed. But the evidence hasn't been well-supported.

Other studies have, in fact, shown the opposite: The link between self-esteem and objective personal qualities such as IQ is weak. "Some of the resistance to higher self-esteem comes from inside the individual in the form of selective memory, and some comes from the outside, as exampled by our relationship partners who may want us like that," Swann says. His studies have shown that people with low self-esteem seem to gravitate toward partners who see them negatively.

And he is starting to discover a strange paradox: that the self-esteem of people with low self-esteem actually goes up when they receive negative feedback. "It seems that confirmation in and of itself gives them higher self-esteem; it gives them an anchor," Swann says, adding that clinicians can put this phenomenon to therapeutic use. "The therapist who uses excessive praise, who says, 'You're fine, you're great,' can make things even worse. Certainly, you want to appreciate their good points, as long as it's grounded in reality."

It's not that people with low self-esteem don't want praise and adoration--they do, just like everyone else--but that their desire for acceptance conflicts with their desire for a stable self-view. "The client is thrust into this crossfire between wanting to be valued for who they are, and who they believe they are," Swann says.

"Who they are" is an idea that people form young. In his book, Swann distills attachment theory to explain how people get their ideas about themselves in the first place. Early negative relationships with caregivers can have a pervasive and sometimes enduring impact on children's self-views, he says.

In fact, self-esteem is fairly well-established by the age of 8, says child psychologist Thomas W. Phelan, PhD. An 8-year-old may have already decided how he or she is likely to do academically, socially, physically and behaviorally. "It's a first impression, and first impressions are very durable," says Phelan, author of Self-Esteem Revolutions in Children Understanding and Managing the Critical Transitions in Your Child's Life (Child Management Inc., Glen Ellyn, IL). "The older you get, the harder it is to change."

But the foundations of self-esteem shift--the "revolutions" in the title--from a sense of self based on parents' unconditional love to one based on one's own competence and the conditional acceptance of others.

"As children grow older, more and more of their self-esteem must be earned. It is not something to which they are automatically entitled," Phelan says. "The funny thing is, kids know this perfectly well, but adults want to pretend it's not true."

Another piece of misguided advice adults give to children, according to Phelan, is: "Don't compare yourself to other kids." "How are you supposed to not do that? It's not the way the world works," he says, adding that children gauge their success by comparing it to how they've done in the past, and how they're doing in relation to others.

Change is hard, but it is possible, both Phelan and Swann say. "Low self-esteem is one of the greatest motivators. It's a source of amazing achievement," Phelan says. "Compensation is one of the world's oldest strategies."

A change as radical as transforming a self-concept has to be gradual, Swann says. "Self-esteem is difficult to change because sometimes it calls for fairly dramatic changes," he says. "For example, the person may have to choose different relationships that will support a more positive self-view."

Despite themselves, some people manage to stumble into relationships that counter their distorted self-view, like the man in the joke. But the smarmy slogans of the self-esteem movement have only a fleeting effect, at best, on self-esteem, he says. "The trouble with these canned platitudes is that they don't explain how our notions of ourselves are the the way they are," Swann says. "There's no convincing evidence that they actually raise self-esteem."

"Promoting self-esteem is hard work," adds Phelan. "It's time we recognized that self-esteem and growing up are wedded forever. The usual gimmicks and wishful thinking which we've become accustomed to are not only inadequate, they are also an insult to the true complexity of the job facing children as they grow up."

The lower a person's self-esteem, the harder it is to raise, and, for some people who are also psychotically depressed, it can be almost impossible, Swann says. But the process can at least begin by recognizing the "self-traps" that sabotage people's sense of themselves, and their futures.

"Once people have identified what's wrong with them, that gives them hope, and that is in itself uplifting," Swann says.

Abstract: The education process has declined to such a degree that few students realize true self-esteem. The idea of a global self-esteem is artificial as it does not promote academic achievement and tricks children. Academic achievement can promote earned self-esteem.
 

Americans have lost confidence in their public schools. A 1996 Washington Post survey asked people what worries them about the future. They were given dozens of choices, from high crime rates to increasing drug usage to economic anxiety. Of all these, they considered the deterioration of public schools to be the country's most pressing problem. "The American educational system will get worse instead of better," said 62% of them.

This is not a new concern. Frustrated by everything from a long-term decline in test scores to the rise in juvenile violence, many Americans are left scratching their heads in bewilderment. What has gone wrong? What can reverse these trends? Desperate for anything that might boost the academic achievement of their charges, many schools have turned to self-esteem theory, which promises that teaching children to feel good about themselves will help them perform better as students. This pedagogical approach has begun to dislodge the more traditional emphasis on basic subjects such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

This is fundamentally wrongheaded. There is little reason to believe self-esteem leads to academic achievement or is even necessary for academic success. It is therefore crucial to delegitimize the education establishment's mindless glorification of self-esteem. As Richard Weissbourd has written in The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America's Children and What We Can Do About Them, schools gripped by self-esteem theory "are, in essence, producing a generation of poorly educated adults who will lack the habits of hard work and perseverance that have historically been necessary to achieving true success."

There is no shor-tage of ways to define self-esteem. Perhaps the simplest one is found in Webster's Dictionary: "satisfaction with oneself." The Basic Behavioral Science Task Force of the National Advisory Mental Health Council offers a fuller explanation: "Self-esteem begins to develop early in life and has been studied in children as young as seven years of age. As children learn to describe aspects of themselves, such as their physical attributes, abilities, and preferences, they also begin to evaluate them. Researchers conclude that, contrary to intuition, individuals have not one but several views of their selves, encompassing many domains of life, such as scholastic ability, physical appearance and romantic appeal, job competence, and adequacy as a provider."

Psychologists generally split self-esteem into two types: earned and global. The concepts of each differ in critical ways:

Earned self-esteem is attained by individuals through their own accomplishments -- satisfaction from having scored well on an exam, for instance. Psychologist Barbara Lemer indicates that earned self-esteem "is based on success in meeting the tests of reality -- measuring up to standards at home and in school." Earned self-esteem possesses all of the positive character traits that ought to be encouraged and applauded, because it ultimately is based on work habits.

Global self-esteem refers to a general sense of pride in oneself It is not grounded in a particular skill or achievement. This means that an underachieving student still can bask in the warmth of global self-esteem, even if the door to earned self-esteem is shut. Although theorists contend that this feeling of self-worth will inspire academic success, the reality is different. At best, global self-esteem is meaningless. At worst, it is harmful. William Damon, an educational psychologist at Brown University, warns that heightened global self-esteem can lead children to have "an exaggerated, though empty and ultimately fragile sense of their own powers ... [or] a distrust of adult communications and self-doubt."

The fundamental difference between earned and global self-esteem rests on their relationships to academic achievement. The idea of earned self-esteem says that achievement comes first and that self-esteem follows. Global self-esteem theory -- which is more popular in schools -- maintains that self-esteem leads the way and achievement trails behind. Earned self-esteem needs no nurturing. It will develop almost naturally when youngsters have accomplished something worthwhile. Global self-esteem, though, is artificial. It requires active intervention on the part of teachers, parents, and other authority figures. It is more than mere encouragement -- something all children need. Instead, it involves tricking kids into thinking that anything and everything they do is praiseworthy.

In 1986, a group of California state legislators convinced themselves that low self-esteem was the root cause behind a variety of social and economic problems such as drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and poor school performance. Before taking this line of thinking too far, however, they decided they needed some research to back up their claims. So they established the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, which published its findings in a book called The Social Importance of Self-Esteem. The editors might as well have titled it The Social Unimportance of Self-esteem because they found practically no connection between self-esteem and any of the behaviors they studied. As Neil Smelser noted in the introduction, "One of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume ... is how low the associations between self-esteem and its consequences are in research to date." Over the years, other reviewers have offered similar readings of the available research, pointing out the results are unimpressive or characterized by massive inconsistencies and contradictions. The California Task Force was not a disinterested group of scholars. They wanted to find a link. Nevertheless, when their research failed to turn one up, they had the honesty to admit it.

Scholars who focus on the connection between high global self-esteem and academic success have run into similar barriers. When psychologists Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler tested the academic skills of elementary school students in Japan, Taiwan, China, and the U.S., the Asian students easily outperformed their American counterparts. That came as no surprise. However, when the same students were asked how they felt about their subject skills, the Americans exhibited a significantly higher self-evaluation of their academic prowess than their foreign peers. In other words, they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem. As Stevenson and Stigler point out, schools teach their students to indulge in self-congratulation only after they have paid their dues, by years of learning and hard work. While educators in most countries are disdainful of pride -- one manifestation of a high self-esteem -- American teachers encourage it as a positive personality trait.

Part of the problem, Stevenson and Stigler found, lies in American teachers' priorities in the classroom. They focus much more on sensitivity to students' egos, whereas Asians concentrate on their ability to explain things clearly. Indeed, roughly half of the Asian teachers surveyed stated that clarity is one of the most important attributes required to be a good teacher. Just 10% of them said that sensitivity is equally important. Given the same set of choices, American teachers reversed priorities. Moreover, American teachers avoid criticizing poor performance, fearing damage to students' self-esteem. Japanese and Chinese teachers, on the other hand, regard mistakes as an index of what remains to be learned through persistence and increased effort. American schools worry more about how students view themselves than about their actual academic performance.

Australian researchers B.C. Hansford and J.A. Hattie scoured academic literature on the link between global self-esteem and academic achievement. Although they found a slim correlation, they also discovered that the better the research, the lower and less significant the connection. They recommended replacing attempts to raise global self-esteem with efforts to boost academic or subject-specific self-esteem -- which can not occur unless students achieve academic success.

Other studies show that programs created to promote self-esteem among elementary school students actually produce less of it than those designed to improve academic performance. The best research in this area evaluated a Federal Head Start program to help children in grades one to three, called Project Follow-through. The researchers appointed different schools to implement the project. To judge the effectiveness of self-esteem in underwriting academic success, they selected schools with differing philosophies of education. The models then were categorized into three major types: holistically oriented classrooms prone to promote self-esteem, behaviorally oriented models emphasizing traditional basic instruction, and combination models that joined the other two. Researchers examined 9,000 students on a variety of measures, from basic to cognitive and affective skills. Those taught using the behavioral model received the highest scores not only in academics, but on self-esteem. The researchers, therefore, could conclude safely that programs designed to provide young children with the tools for academic success tend to be more effective as they improve in both academic performance and self-esteem.

This rule is not limited to young children. Thomas Moeller, a psychology professor at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va., examined students in grades six and higher. In every instance, Moeller concluded, "academic achievement is more closely related to academic self-concept than to global self-concept."

Other research found that although academic achievement in one grade level predicts academic self-esteem in the next, neither academic achievement nor academic self-esteem have any identifiable effect on global self-esteem. Still other research finds that grades in a given discipline affect academic self-esteem just in that particular discipline. General academic self-concept finds its roots in a school's climate, teachers' ratings, and students' commitment to work.

Adolescents' academic performance seems not even to be a factor affecting global self-esteem. Instead, they respond to social activities. High school performance, academic ability, and socioeconomic status affect educational attainment more than global self-esteem.

Because self-esteem theory advertises itself as a quick fix to poor academic achievement, it would make sense that the neediest students are the most vulnerable to its deceptive message. Indeed, black students enrolled in Afrocentric educational programs receive a full-course diet in self-esteem enhancement, all of it positioned on the shaky theoretical ground that injecting racial pride into black children will help them overcome obstacles to academic success. Again, the value of self-esteem for black children is highly questionable, even if it does not come packaged in Afrocentrism.

Self-esteem theory made its first dramatic impact upon American schools in 1954, when the Supreme Court accepted that school segregation damaged the self-esteem of African-American children in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Low self-esteem, the Court said, "affects the motivation of a child to learn, and has a tendency to retard children's educational and mental development." According to author Barbara Lemer, this proposition makes three questionable assumptions about blacks: Low self-esteem is the major cause of low academic achievement; blacks have a lower self-esteem than whites; and changing white attitudes toward blacks will raise black self-esteem. Taken together, these notions provide the reasoning behind the current repudiation of high standards and expectations in the public schools.

In reality, research reveals that black children at the same grade level and in the same school system as white children display a higher sense of self-esteem. African-Americans usually report slightly higher levels of agreement with statements about taking a positive attitude toward oneself, judging oneself to be a person "of worth," and being generally satisfied with oneself.

Studies show that, like whites, enhancement of global self-concept is not a potent intervention for academic improvement for African-American adolescents. Stanley Rothman and his colleagues at Smith College's Center for the Study of Social and Political Change found that, while the self-esteem levels of blacks now are at least as high as those of whites, the average academic attainment among African-American students still is below that of whites. They conclude that the evidence "appears to show quite conclusively that the low self-esteem hypothesis is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation of African-American achievement levels."

Those who think low self-esteem is the cause of high crime rates among blacks also are wrong. According to a 1996 study by psychologists Roy Baumeister, Joseph Boden, and Laura Smart, "first, [this notion] does not fit the transient shifts in the crime rate among African Americans, which is now reaching its highest levels as slavery recedes farther and farther into the background. Second, self-esteem levels among African Americans are now equal to, or higher than, the self-esteem levels of whites. Third, it is far from certain that slaves had a low self-esteem." A study by Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major of the State University of New York at Buffalo similarly refuted the psychological theories that claim members of stigmatized groups (blacks, for example) should possess low global self-esteem. They argued that stigmatized individuals are not simply "passive victims but are frequently able to actively protect their self-esteem from prejudice and discrimination."

Ironically, adolescent African-American males living in impoverished neighborhoods are more likely to turn violent if schools bombard them with unearned praise. Baumeister, Boden, and Smart found that, when high self-esteem is challenged by others' negative views, egotism is threatened. People react in one of two ways. They either lower their self-appraisal and withdraw or maintain their self-appraisal and manifest negative emotions toward the source of the ego threat. This response easily can become violent in individuals who place high emphasis on their self-appraisals.

Every day in the name of self-esteem, schools cheat low-income children (many of whom are black) into settling for inflated egos instead of increased knowledge. Such efforts aimed at guaranteeing minorities heightened self-esteem, coupled with lawsuits challenging minimum competency exams and proficiency tests, erroneously assume that these youngsters' self-esteem can not possibly get proper nourishment in the poor households in which they are reared. Social workers and teachers create special courses and excuses for these kids on a regular basis.

In The Vulnerable Child, Weissbourd vehemently attacks such efforts, asserting that, "although poor children are more likely to suffer an array ... of problems, the great majority of poor children are prepared to learn. at least when they begin school. Developmental delays and serious learning difficulties among children ages three to five are higher among poor than among middle- and upper-income children.... But over 75 percent of poor children ages 6-11 have never experienced significant developmental delays, or emotional troubles, or a learning disability in childhood." Weissbourd highly discourages enrolling disadvantaged minority kids in remedial courses or special education classes because it makes it more difficult for them to move into the mainstream.

From lower standards to a reduced emphasis on tests, minorities constantly are told that their egos somehow are more fragile and thus different from the rest of America, even though they have the most to gain from traditional ways of teaching. In fact, blacks can flourish in this type of environment, as the experiences of schools such as Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), Xavier Prep (New Orleans), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), and Dunbar (Washington, D.C.) have shown. African-Americans excel in these schools because they are expected to strive high and achieve. Instead of offering a broad array of extracurricular classes or dumbing down their curriculum to increase the pupils' self-esteem, the schools offer a strict diet of math and reading and expect students to get the job done. As Sister Helen Struder, principal of the mostly black Holy Angels School in Chicago, notes, "After all, it's by success that you build self-esteem."

After years of failed experimentation, it is time to stop touting the importance of self-esteem and start providing students with the elements real self-esteem is made of. Building self-esteem not only is a smokescreen vis-a-vis academic success, it can lead to considerable harm. After all, as Weissbourd points out, "to develop effective coping strategies, children, in fact, need to learn to manage a certain amount of disappointment and conflict."

As schools turn against self-esteem theory, they must go back to the basics of teaching, reinstalling high standards and expectations, and holding children accountable for their actions. However, these efforts ought not replace paying attention to children's needs and concerns as individuals. Many educators agree on three general strategies: build the relationship between a teacher or parent and a child on respect for the child's inborn strengths; help the youngster set goals and then link sustained effort with success; and examine the values being promoted, because self-esteem is grounded on what a person values.

The final and probably most important remedy is reintroducing parents in the education of their offspring. Experts unanimously agree that parental involvement in a child's education remains one of the most important factors in determining his or her academic success. Furthermore, parents supersede teachers at building earned self-esteem in their children through the special caring and positive/negative reinforcement that only can come with individualized interaction at home.

Abstract: The educational movement to develop self-esteem in students does not improve academic performance. This is shown by the continuing decline in test scores while criticism of students is replaced by positive role models or programs for ethnic or racial pride. The hierarchy of the educational establishment favors self-esteem programs for their own benefit, so this approach will continue to distract from improvements in education.
 

Educators have for some time been united in the belief that to do well in school students above all else require high self-esteem. Yet the merest glance at either the professional literature it is the responsibility of educators to read, or the student testing results on which they comment annually, makes it clear that they are wrong. How well or poorly students think of themselves neither helps nor hinders their work. Raising self-esteem, as all the studies show, simply does not raise academic achievement. Neither, one may add, does raising the self-esteem of educators improve their performance. No professional group thinks better of itself than they, yet they have presided over a stunning, thirty-year-long decline of schooling at every level.

Despite their high self-esteem, moreover, they have proven incapable of learning the simplest lessons. It does not help students simply to encourage them about their work. It does not help to "empower" them by puffing up pride in their ethnic or racial group, everywhere highlighting and exaggerating its accomplishments. And it does not help to give students "positive role models": public figures from the already glorified history of their group, along with same-color or ethnic-group teachers right in the classroom.

All of these and more have been provided in grammar and high schools for some ten years. Yet educators, ever dedicated to reform," continue to advocate manipulating self-esteem as though it represented a brave new initiative. In education the hoariest practices, if originally introduced as reforms, will never lose their aura of embattled innovation. This has been true, for example, of the thoroughly ensconced and perennially unsuccessful "look-say" method for teaching reading, of the equally disastrous "new math," of open classrooms, and of solipsistic concentration on students' own lives and own creative impulses at the expense of objectivity and technique.

Each of these innovations, in common with self-esteem manipulation, has within the past fifty years not only been introduced as the latest, bravely advocated, stubbornly resisted educational reform to date, but also has continued to be regarded in that light despite its evident, measurable failure with generations of students. But "failure" is not quite the term wanted here. The innovations in question have been mighty contributors to the ever worsening decline of American schools. And of them all, the grand effort to produce better scholars by kidding children and youths about their achievements can hardly be matched either for fatuousness of conception, catastrophic outcome in practice, or dogged allegiance on the part of educators.

The educationists are aided by the reluctance of sociologists to investigate a theory so politically correct as self-esteem. "Few sociologists," Paul Hollander has pointed out, "would venture on an empirical study of the taken-for-granted link between group pride and academic achievement." When a reporter for the New York Times asked teachers in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, middle school about self-esteem, some were willing to admit that the wholesale praise they were required to give out had become meaningless. The only measurable effect of their efforts to raise self-esteem was to give practically every child in the school an A average. But the teachers who were willing to admit all this to a reporter "asked not to be identified."

Despite the constraints on openly discussing the failure of self-esteem, a number of sociological studies have been undertaken over the years, as Henry Louis Gates pointed out in the Modern Language Association's publication, Profession, in 1992. A 1979 survey of such studies in the Review of Educational Research found that "neither the internal needs model [i.e., self-esteem] nor the identification with one's ethnic group model has stimulated an educational model with positive results linking self-concept with academic achievement." In plain English, pushing self-esteem and ethnic pride does not make better students. On this educational approach the evidence was "overwhelmingly negative." Again in 1989 a team of researchers summarizing the literature in an article in the American Sociological Review concluded: "Research shows that efforts to improve academic performance by raising self-esteem have generally not met with success."

How is it possible for educators to maintain their allegiance to self-esteem not only in the face of scientific evidence but also of continuing reports on the front pages of newspapers across the land showing inexorably declining scores on standardized tests? In 1993, for example, New York City students dropped 11 percent in math test ranking against the national average. For seven years, during which the city administered its own test, scores had risen steadily-to the accompaniment of much self congratulation on the part of the education bureaucracy. This time, though, students had to take the California Achievement test, and the city's true ranking was revealed-not 60 percent were performing at grade level as in the previous year, but just 49 percent.

The students had not really done any better in math during the seven fat years of rising scores: it was all just a matter of their teachers knowing the local test well enough to drill them narrowly in exactly what they needed to get through this particular test. Or did the teachers show them the actual questions in advance? Past scandals alert us to this possibility, as does a savvy reading of the educationese explanation given to the New York Times by Richard M. Wolf, chairman of the Department of Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics at Teacher's College, Columbia University. "As students and teachers in a school system work with a test and become familiar with the format," said Wolf, "scores tend to rise." But then, "when you introduce a new test, you see a dropoff until students and teachers begin to familiarize themselves with it." Oh.

*** Last-minute, breaking story. The New York Times, 18 June 1993 (nine days after the math scores story): "Public School Reading Scores Show Modest Rise." Citywide, New York City students moved up 1.4 percent towards the national average. (The national average may be defined as the point at which, upon learning the scores, city school administrators begin to congratulate themselves - and suburban mothers are likely to undergo fainting spells.) Evidently, students and teachers were "familiar with the format" of the reading test. One wonders whether it will be replaced before or after the system's students reach all the way to the national average.

But to return to the math test. Significantly, the self-congratulating educationists did not mention self-esteem when scores had seemed to be on the rise, but emphasized instead how well they were doing at teaching the basics (which they were, of course, actually neglecting). Yet just as the theory proposed, student self-esteem had been bolstered and rising scores had been the apparent result. Why was self-esteem not therefore credited? Self-esteem never came to mind, it seems clear, because the educationists never actually believed in it in the first place. Theirs was an allegiance of convenience, not belief.

What else could they do about falling test scores but continue to put forward self-esteem as the way out? The true scores always eventually revealed themselves, despite all attempts to keep the old "familiar" tests in place. Should the educationists have worked harder at making students do better? This was not an acceptable solution. Such an approach would shift all the emphasis of education to the classroom, leaving little room for educationists to spread themselves in public. Needed before all else were educational ideas about which one could write and lecture, not have to carry out. Next, something less intractable than subjects like math and reading had to be found at which students could appear to be doing well.

Enter the current curriculum. Students are doing well at it. They can repeat the commonplace that all species and all peoples of the globe are interconnected. Semester by semester they can display increasing concern about the ecosystem. And finally, they can be said to feel better and better about themselves. True, teaching self-esteem is identical with the phenomenon presented by Mark Twain in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," in which a con man convinces his audience (and a good many readers) that he has taught a frog to jump. But there is hardly any danger that someone will point out that the students didn't lack self-esteem in the first place.

Self-esteem, educationists sense, works for them so long as it is referred to vaguely. It is not to be brought up when test scores rise lest it come up again when they fall. It was certainly not a good idea at all to include measures of self-esteem in that math achievement test given a few years ago to students from five industrial nations. In that experiment the self-esteem concept was put at a distinct risk when American kids came out at the bottom, in scores but at the top in their estimates of how good they were in math.

Equally vague as educationist claims about self-esteem - and equally unlikely to be assailed - is the proposition that same-race teachers will somehow make things better for students. This fatuous notion has been blown out of the water, as Walter Williams puts it, by Thomas Sowell in his Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas. There were few black teachers to serve as role models for black students in the 1950s, yet "these students graduated with gradepoint averages far closer to the school average than those who graduated in the 1980s." Furthermore, Williams adds, "it is highly unlikely that a Japanese, Chinese or Vietnamese student will ever have a ~role model' teaching a class, yet these minorities lead the nation in academic excellence."

It is significant that the lead in exposing the inefficacy of self-esteem manipulation has been taken by black scholars of both the left - Henry Louis Gates - and the right - Sowell and Williams. For whether such manipulation be used at inner city grammar schools in the form of crude appeals to ethnic pride, or at universities in the form of multiculturalism with its illogical and emotional elevation of nonwestern cultures, black students in particular are the targets. Yet even without Sowell's devastating examples, a moment's reflection will recall to anyone who has ever wished to emulate another that the person's attraction lay in some quality of spirit rather than anything so superficial as skin color.

How trivial racial and ethnic origins seem when we contemplate the grand sweep of historical development and its telos, or Hegelian "Absolute purpose." How undistinguished, how unseemly and intellectually vulgar to encourage taking pride in achievement based on group identity - and how personally demeaning and self-delusory. Imagine extolling Edison as a white man. White parents would bridle if teachers attempted so to catechize their children - not only because it would be racist to do so but also because this is not how parents - whether white or black - want their children to gain self-confidence. Self-esteem, they realize, works the other way around from what educationists describe. Students who truly do well tend to be proud of their accomplishment. Therefore it is hard work leading to academic success that can be said to affect self-esteem.

If attempts to raise self-esteem simply do not make better students, as is so abundantly clear, then what outcome do such attempts actually have? In the first place, teaching about human groups with the purpose of raising the pride of their members invariably distorts both the groups' achievements and the degree to which they have suffered (in America). Victimization, furthermore, always gradually gets the greater part of the play when the past is viewed through the lens of groups. First come great African kings, the achievements of Egyptian civilization, and brave women of the past, and then comes the litany of complaint about western imperialism, slavery, and the subjection of women. The emphasis ends up being on the vulnerability, weakness, or backwardness of the groups concerned - not only racial and gender groups but also homosexuals, American Indians, the feeble-minded, and any other group possessing the power, or powerful advocates, able to have it certified as weak.

Teachers next attempt to paper over the contradictions between the groups' victim status and their supposedly glorious and authoritative contributions to civilization - not to mention their current political power as reflected in the deference shown them in the curriculum. The students, though, sense the anomalies. They know cant when they smell it, and so they come to appreciate that ethnic boasting is largely a tissue of exaggerations and fabrications. If students derive any self-esteem from exercises in ethnic fakery, it comes from the satisfaction of having seen through a ruse.

What the students may fail to assess, though, is the embarrassingly low level of intellection that results when the human record is engaged in terms of ethnicity. They might just as well be in a barroom as a classroom - or, rather, they would be better off in a barroom where they would at least be spared the oozy sanctimony of their teachers on the subject of ethnicity. Nor would the barroom divert them any further away from genuine instruction than does ethnicity puffery. In the classrooms of today, student respect for education cannot help but be lowered as students realize that teaching amounts more and more to crude propagandizing.

This is not to say that there is no room in the world for ethnic pride. Outside of school it is perfectly proper for children to enjoy group identity, including a degree of exaggeration about their own kind. "Dad: Did you know that Rex Harrison was Jewish?" Or, "George Washington Carver had that idea years before the Skippy peanut butter people." Or, "It wasn't only the Okies who suffered in the Depression: Puerto Ricans and Mexicans like your grandfather were picking lettuce in the hot California sun for even lower wages." ,

When the same matters come up in school they need to be dealt with dispassionately. From the contrast with dinner table conversation students will notice that school doesn't always convey the whole story, or rather doesn't convey fully their own emotional interest in the story. But this is just the point: there is supposed to be such a difference between school and life. It is natural for different groups of students to have different emotional reactions to what they find in history. But it is precisely by dealing with none of these separate reactions that the school honors - or at least used to honor - individual students by treating them as being capable of dispassionate analysis.

One day these students will meet a self-educated individual who will claim to have gone to the school of hard knocks and who will correctly observe that "there's a lot they don't teach you in school." To this one has to reply: "Nor should they teach it." Neither teaching about life nor conveying the emotive collective memories of groups should be the business of schools. The schools having foolishly made both of these things their business, they have succeeded in bolstering self-esteem, the number of teenage pregnancies, the level of condom comprehension, and the level of group resentment. But inevitably, as they have raised these, they have depressed the levels of literacy and thinking.

By now, educationists are themselves products of the heedless system they are perpetuating. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that they are everywhere lacking in historical perspective and in the training and habits of mind that would direct them to view the self-esteem project in light of the wisdom of the past. If they did so consider it, they would realize that they have been tampering with the human characteristic - pride - that moralists and philosophers have warned against before all others. Pride is - or was - the most notorious of the Seven Deadly Sins. The idea of encouraging pride would once have been regarded not only as blasphemous but also as pitiably ludicrous: "Of all the causes which conspire to blind / Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, / What the weak head with strongest bias rules, / Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools" (Alexander Pope).

All things considered, it would seem to make a lot more sense to be teaching humility, with its proven record of serving to stimulate intellectual effort, than to foster prideful self-esteem. Specifically, the attitude in shortest supply at the moment is criticism of student performance. Words not heard in a classroom in twenty years: "You are not doing well, Johnny. Can't you get a few simple formulas through your head?"

Why in the past did this approach work better than sensitivity does today? Wasn't such hectoring a terrible violation of the young psyche - of self-esteem? It was not. The pointed question did not damage self-esteem because it implied the response, "Yes, I can learn them, but I wasn't paying attention" or, "I admit I didn't study and do all my homework." Criticism from a teacher, it develops, presumes a student's worth - self-esteem - self-respect. The teacher who was critical of student work (not of the student), or simply honest in evaluating that work, neither damaged self-esteem nor fostered a false sense of it.

To be sure, though self-esteem is far sturdier than the educationists suppose, in young people it is certainly not impervious to attack. We all know from experience that a teacher can make a child feel bad - to the point of wounding his self-esteem. Wounding is not killing: self-esteem runs deeper than school experience. Yet it is obviously not desirable for children to be wounded. And conversely it follows that rewards and praise for achievement - when that achievement is genuine - can bolster self-esteem. If schools can both teach subjects and help children grow into strong maturity, so much the better. After all, from Plato onward the philosophers have looked to education to build character as well as minds.

Only in the past quarter-century of human history has anyone been so foolish as to attempt the crude personality manipulation of the educationists. Previously, it took no more than common sense to realize that the result would be to nurture neither character nor mind. School reformers, when they addressed student feelings, wisely confined themselves to recommending that teachers be less hard on students. Quite right: everyone has been better off since teachers began to spare the rod. To lay on the malarkey in place of the rod, though, has at best fostered in students false self-esteem, and at worst damaged self-esteem as much as was ever done in the past. In the meantime, teachers forced to deceive students, though they ask "not to be identified," are saying as clearly as they can that dispensing self-esteem undermines their teaching. Self-esteem in education has been of, by, and for the educationist hierarchy alone. Despite the mounting evidence from every quarter, therefore, it is not to be expected that the hierarchy will soon give up an educational approach so rewarding to themselves.

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