Posted on 08/18/2006 6:54:39 AM PDT by Graybeard58
Life is about contrasts. Happy and sad. Winners and losers. Pleasure and pain. Without bad days, how will you recognize good days when they come around? But to self-esteem despots, life is a even-steven proposition. Everyone, regardless of talent or temperament, perseverance or personality, is treated equally, even when they manifestly are not.
The Associated Press recently recounted some of the horror stories arising from self-esteeming running amok. Many schools don't let children talk about sleepovers unless every child in the room has been invited. They don't let children hand out invitations to birthday parties if even one classmate is excluded. In town-sponsored softball and soccer leagues, scorekeeping is verboten in games for kids 9 or under, and win or lose, every player gets a trophy at season's end.
This noxious nonsense is not entirely new, but it has become more widespread as the ranks of self-esteemists have swelled. But this movement is producing legions of children with perverse views of success and failure. As one Boston preschool teacher put it: "Kids grow up and have this inflated sense of self-worth. ... They have no sense that you have to work hard for some things."
Essentially, they grow up lacking a requisite appreciation for life's contrasts. If they are rewarded for sloth, they never learn the benefits of hard work. At the same time, when the prizes for success and failure are identical, children lose any motivation to put in the extra effort required for authentic achievement. Ultimately, they believe themselves entitled to rewards even when they've done nothing to earn them.
This disserves children because when they emerge from the womb of self-esteem, they find vastly different rules in place in the real world. There, the contrasts of success and failure, and reward and punishment, are in full force, and employers are concerned about results, not feelings.
Self-esteemists who fret about rising rates of suicide and depression among children today are blissfully unaware these trends arguably result from their handiwork. Having been deprived of knowledge of life's many contrasts, children are more likely to wallow in self-pity and suffer from hopelessness because they are intellectually and emotionally unprepared to deal with failure, criticism and rejection when it inevitably comes along.
This is quite pleasant and had I a wish I would wish that the editors of your fine newspaper would move here and run the Raleigh N&O. CT could then have our editors, whose texts seem so much more in line with the blueness of the rest of your great state.
Certainly in all this, nothing bad intended or meant.
I'm sorry. This is just common sense and good manners. The school should not have to be involved to make this happen. This is stuff that any parent should be able to figure out.
And will, no doubt, prescribe more of the same medicine to cure the problem of their own making.
Respectfully, I don't think that is true. When I was younger I wouldn't have wanted to be invited to a party just because my school forced the people giving the party to invite me. School is not (or shouldn't be) a commune. Children get freedom of association too!
I agree. I was flipping through some dumb magazine at the doctor's office and there was a piece written my some woman who claimed she was fat because she had low self esteem so she ate a lot.
I would argue that her hefty sense of entitlement (I feel bad so I'm going to stuff my face with ice cream and cookies) was the primary contributor to her hefty size.
The it's-all-about-how-I-feel crowd wallows in self esteem which leads to entitlement-based behavior.
Garrison Keillor is a humorist who describes Lake Wobegon as a place where all the children are above average. People chuckle, because they know that's silly. Yet, the same people try to convince all the children in their own community that they are "special" and deserve prizes for every little thing -- no matter how pitiful the child's performance may have been.
We do children no favors by pretending that no one ever falls short. It's a simple truth, the kids will learn it sooner or later, and the later they learn it the more devastating the lesson will be.
I agree that the school should not force the issue. The parents should be able to figure this out on their own. If there are a rude parents who want to let their child exclude one or two members of the class, well, that's the real world.
But, those of us from MN chuckle with a different tone, as for a long time, the average MN student scored above the national averages. It was indeed possible for a strong majority of the students in a small town to be above the national average.
REAL Esteem comes from accomplishment. That's why I'm a Scout Leader.
Tom Petty, nailing it.
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