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.
I'm on that right now. I've been discussing critical thinking with my son. We've been discussing how if man causes "Global Warming" or "Climate Change", how does one explain 7-8 recorded climatical changes, and potentially more that have occured from 3,000BC through today?
What caused Egypt to turn from a garden paradise to a desert wasteland? What made the dark ages dark? How do we account for said climate changes as recorded and retrieved from polar ice samples without industrialization? How does one account for climatical changes on Mars? Does the sun have seasons like the Earth or is it always hot? If not, is the sun consistent throughout it's existence or does it live and die like any other star? Can solar changes impact the Earth? And so on...
He's been able to effectively end conversations with similar questions. The mindless brain-washed who forward such notions don't debate at this age, but they don't continue after being embarrased, either.
The idea that youth cannot be allowed to fail (lest the psyche be bruised forever) means that the first perceived failure will probably come too late to teach the right lessons.
Good points and I am going to give them to my daughter. Since we are both doing the same thing let me know if you find anymore info and I will do the same. Rush has some great stuff on his website also.
One other thing I got from the article and the author did not mention, is that the educators - instead of blaming themselves for why children were not doing well - placed the emphasis on the student. I got a lesson in self-esteem in my senior year of high school. For government class, we were required to do a report on the local elections. Pick a candidate, write a report on him, and so on. One of the few papers I handed in on the assigned day. Only two people in the class got an A. The class brain and myself. I felt good. Nothing makes you feel better than earning the grade, putting in the winning shot, winning the game, etc. But first and foremost, you have to know you earned it and was not given the grade.
ping
No, we let our schools and our townships do it to them. On the other hand, some of us didn't allow it to happen to our kids.
I don't think I've ever read or heard a better treatise on this subject.
You are right. After all, it is mostly "Generation X" that is doing all the selfless fighting and dying in Iraq right now. I am a boomer and, on reflection, we are as bad or worse. The Vietnam War protests were not really about war but about the inconvenience of being drafted.
My twin daughters are in the 4th grade in school in California. Every 4th grader (even in the private schools) has to do a mission project. I hate the thing. It cannot be done alone.
My daughters built missions. A few years back, my son made a video tape of one.
I don't know that it really taught my daughters that much. I actually think the field trips to the mission teaches much more than the project.
I like projects that are simple and kids can do all by themselves. I also think most should be done in school.
I think the main homework should be reading. Hopefully, a parent will have time to spend reading with their child. (I don't always have time to spend reading with my 3 kids, so I think this is also difficult.)
The unintended consequences of abolishing the draft in 1973 are still being felt today.
Even the men who tried to avoid military service learned real life lessons in survival.
Notions of duty, teamwork and patriotism are slowly being nudged aside by the generations described here.
Events like 9/11 have a unifying effect on our nation, but there's nothing like a couple of years in the army to make you see past your own immediate needs.
That said, today's military is superior to the one I served in way back when.
My 12 year old has easily seen through junk taught to him (or mentioned by other students). In elementary school, there were a bunch of kids worried about cutting down trees because of an edangered owl.
My son thought they were crazy because you need wood to build houses, make paper, etc. He knew these kids used all of these products, but they didn't want to cut down the trees.
He says there are a lot of kids that are against the war. He says they can't tell you why except that all wars are bad. My son knows that's crazy because he loves military history. He's very into Roman history.
What does that mean?
Carolyn
We have a 6-year-old neighbor girl who likes to roam the neighborhood looking for someone to give her attention, which usually involves coming over to our yard and bugging us when we are busy with chores.
One day she was roaming around with a skippy-do thing. She was skipping it around the circle while our next-door neighbor cheered and clapped, "Way to go Brittney! Good job!" I wanted to barf. The girl was so drunk off the attention that she immediately ran over into our yard calling my husband's name, figuring she could do it for him and get another mega-dose of attention. I gave him a look, and he just kept working and told her we were busy.
Yes, kids need to learn that they are not the center of the universe. And the sooner, the better.
At least some of these studies have been very well done, and the results are overwhelmingly statistically significant.
ping
National Geographic: Melting Mars Means Man-Made Global Warming a Myth
I prefer the word vanity to pride. Maybe pride was a translation error and it should have been vanity. Being proud of doing a job well done is not a sin. Being vain is. Envy is closely coupled with vanity. Envy is the origin of most of the evil in the world. But with pride there is no envy.
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Extremely well stated!
Thanks!
Moral Absolutes list?
I read FR last night and now I'm sneaking back on...maybe I'll somehow or other take time by the throat and manage to do some pinging soon!
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