Posted on 03/01/2007 7:00:19 AM PST by shortstop
The chickens have come home to roost.
The first generation of students swaddled in the insanity of the self-esteem movement have emerged on the scene as arrogant, self-absorbed twits with an exaggerated sense of entitlement and self-importance.
In short, they’ve been spoiled. Potentially, they’ve been ruined.
The idiocy of social engineering in the classroom is again bearing catastrophic results.
Here’s how we know. A group of five university professors has evaluated more than 16,000 personality profiles of college students gathered over the last 24 years. What they’ve discovered is that today’s young people have dramatically different self-concepts than the two generations which preceded them.
And the differences aren’t good.
Today’s college students are monumentally more narcissistic. That means they worship themselves. That means they’ve been told that they’re special so many times that they’ve come to believe it. In blunt terms, they think their crap doesn’t stink.
But it does. Possibly more than most.
Because one of the hallmarks of an inflated self-concept is personal failure. People who think they are superior have an uncanny tendency to be inferior. Their sense of worth is so high they have no motivation to work and improve themselves. When you think the world is yours on a silver platter, it never occurs to you that you’ve got to get off your backside and earn anything.
The study shows that children born after 1982 have a unrealistically inflated self-concepts. So high is their estimation of themselves, in fact, that they are fully narcissistic – a trait that is somewhere in the gray area between a character flaw and a personality disorder. Narcissism is such an unhealthy aberration that it is almost a mental illness.
And the self-esteem movement of the 1990s has made it epidemic.
Unfortunately, the education industry has become so divorced from reality that for several years the conventional wisdom in American classrooms has been that children – particularly poor and minority children – fail to achieve because they have negative self-concepts. The way to correct that, the argument has gone, is to pump up their self-concepts through self-esteem building. That typically translated to unrealistic and unearned praise for students, and the removal of all negative feedback and consequences from the classroom. That’s why grades are artificially high, everybody gets a smiley face and teachers don’t use red ink any more.
Schools seem incapable of recognizing that true self-worth comes from doing what’s right and from legitimate achievement. Not praise passed out like candy, but genuine achievement coming as the consequence of significant effort. You earn worth, it isn’t given out for free.
The lunacy of the education reformers was matched by the leniency of the troubled homes. Mom and dad have forgotten how to be mom and dad. Children were waited on hand and foot with no obligations of their own to work or assist the family. Permissive parenting and failed educating led to a bumper crop of egocentric creeps.
And that’s going to hurt.
Because narcissists typically fail. They fail in their responsibility to be good citizens and they fail in their responsibility to be good spouses and parents.
Being a good citizen and being part of a family requires selflessness. They require putting your own interests second to the interests of something larger and more important than yourself. To the narcissist, there is nothing more important than yourself.
That leads to employment and self-reliance difficulties, and to significant challenges to the ability to maintain a marriage and raise a family.
Which bites society hard. Society needs this crop of young adults – like every crop of young adults – to assume its responsibilities as the taxpayers and the parents of the future. Each rising tide needs to shoulder its burdens and leave its mark. Failure to do that can have huge sociological consequences.
This crop has been weakened in its abilities to bear off those responsibilities by the warped worldview its education and upbringing gave it.
So what can be done?
The self-esteem crap can end. Though it is so entrenched and unquestioned, and protected by political correctness, that it is unlikely to go anywhere.
Young people must learn – with the help of others – that the world doesn’t revolve around them, and that believing it does is the quickest way to a miserable and disappointing life.
The social and religious values of the United States – and of decent nations all around the world – teach selflessness and service. Those values must be re-enthroned and the self-worship of the narcissism-breeding self-esteem movement must end.
The feminization of America...we're seeing the results everywhere...in academia, in the business world, in government, and most unfortunately, in the military.
So if you're counting on social security to retire on, these are the folks who'll be supplying it.
Our enemies are licking their chops, just waiting for Generation Emo to take over...
And when institutions like education become dysfunctional, people find other paths to success.
"The feminization of America..."
I could not agree with you more!
There has to be a balance, feminine sensiblilities temper masculine drives. Go to either extreme and you have a mess. We've chosen the feminine route. I saw this coming for a long time.
I can't tell you how stupid I thought it was when coaching in Y baseball leagues, (early ages), and they didn't keep score. "We are all winners". Bull! Sure, it made some of the kids happy, the kids that will ultimately end up working for the ones who knew the score and played to win.
On the bright side, a trend that was going on when I was in my late 20s was to fire older workers and replace them with eager kids. Now that I'm nearing 50, that's not an issue. Any business knows it's a mistake to fire a worker with a good skillset and work ethic, to take a chance on what you get with kids today.
I know so many families where the kid (usually there's only one, at the most two, siblings,) is a spoiled and pampered brat. They don't know what the word "chore" is. The parents think it would be child abuse to make their little darlings do anything resembling a "chore." Oftentimes the parents even do the kids' homework for them. Moms will call each other on the phone asking, "Do you know the answer to question 17 on the history homework?" Then the parents whine about how mean and unfair it is that their little darlings have to carry so many books in their backpacks and those horrible teachers give TWO HOURS of homework a night! Why, the poor, overworked little dears.
What's more, the kids rule the roost. No family decision is made without first getting the approval of the little prince or princess. I know 14-year-olds who literally have never made a sandwich or heated up something in a microwave. They are chauffeured everywhere, have never been on a bus, then they get new cars for their 16th birthdays. They are surly and rude to adults, and they always have earphones in their ears.
But their self-esteem is really, really high.
Exactly right.
And this will be the undoing of America. A feminized nation doesn't have the strength to stand against patriarchial societies like China, Russia, Islam, etc.
In short, unless this is reversed... we're destined to speak 'french'.
narcissism bump for later.........
Orthodox Christians know that self-esteem is a vice. Indeed it is one of the eight grevious vices catalogued by St. John Cassian (the other seven are familar to Western Christians as 'the seven deadly sins'). Some Greek Fathers, like the Latin, don't separate it out from pride, as the following apothegem from the Desert Father shows:
One of the Fathers said, "only perfect humility or perfect pride will allow one to ignore the opinions of men."
The 'self-esteem' movement tries (alas it still continues) to prevent children from yielding to peer pressure by inculcating perfect pride, rather than perfect humility. Not the demonic pride of setting oneself against God, but self-esteem, regarding oneself as better than others, not subject to criticism or correction.
In connection with that saying, the Father told of a monk who bore insults with complete equanimity, but when asked how, replied, "it is the barking of dogs."
Self-esteem creates disobedient monks, uneducable students, and bad citizens.
Pizza party and trophys for all! Most improved, cleanest uniform, best after game snacks, shortest throw, etc. etc.
1. Randon sample
2. Statistically significant representative population
3. Causality shown
Go figure... the Me Generation has raised the MeMeMe Generations. It just immanentizes the eschaton so what the heck.
But here's the worst thing about that kind of feel good education in young children. They experience that in school, but then when viewing what goes on in the real world, it has to be so confusing. Everything from sporting events to American Idol...only one wins and they are celebrated like Gods. I can't even imagine what young kids have to go through these days. We're seeing it in teenagers. The craziness, the depression. They're not self-assured...they're depressed and confused. And we did it to them.
It's kinda like having a car that is really a pile of junk, but you paint it up to look really nice and expect a good ride.
School Honors programs... husband leaned over and asked me if it just wouldn't be simpler to call out the names of anyone who DIDN'T get an award ;}
tatt
Hence the lawsuit explosion. I couldn't possibly have done something wrong, it's somebody else's fault.
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