Self-Esteem Movement Devastating Children and Teaching Questionable Outcomes

The self-esteem movement has devastated many children. The rage in education for the past decade or so is called "outcome based" teaching, where any answer is "correct" if the child thinks it is.

The problem would appear to be that, in this scenario, teachers teach towards a questionable "outcome" -- namely that children "feel good."

Outcome-based education, as a concept, is a common-sense approach. I've written my share of out-come based lesson plans, but my "outcomes" (i.e. expected results) were not that the student "feel good" but that the student be competent in a specific skill (e.g. specific computer skills, writing skills, literary analysis) and that the student develops the ability to think for him/herself.

Different desired outcomes = different results.

On the other hand, I'm not in favor of rigid standards of correct and incorrect that are based solely on the instructor's preconceived ideas. It results in students who strive hard to parrot the instructor's line, regardless of the content. It's most difficult to teach such students to learn to think for themselves. However, it can happen. If we wish our children or students to think for themselves, we need to accept the consequences -- that our children or students may reach different conclusions than we have reached. I made it a policy to assign higher grades to good arguments backing a different conclusion than mine than to poor arguments backing my conclusion. (Of course, I'm quite human, so this principle may have fallen down in practice now and then. ;-))

In spite of this policy it took several years for students to grasp the idea that thinking for themselves was a "good" think and that correct parroting was not the purpose of my teaching.

So, yes, if we wish students to think for themselves, their answer to questions may be quite "correct" if they think it is and can support it with a good argument.

I remember a professor of mine from whom I had taken a class in Reformation history. His exams were always a number of short essays. On a Sunday he called me and asked how I had read a certain question. I told him, and he said, "I see." When I got my exam back, I got a high grade, with a perfect score for that question, even though I had read the question totally differently than he intended, resulting in a technically "incorrect" answer. That teacher knew how to honor independent thinking, and his methodology became my pattern for teaching.

By contrast, another well-loved teacher at one of our universities taught Shakespearean literature. His lectures were wonderful, and he had a genial sense of humor. But his daily quizzes, in which we were supposed to paraphrase Shakespearean passages, were exercises in guessing at his mental processes. If we guessed correctly, we got an 'A.' If we didn't, the very *best* grade would be a 'D.' Being used to doing my own thinking, I wasn't very good at guessing *his* thinking, and my grades swung between 'A' and 'D.' My exam grades were consistently at the top of the class, but my final grade was a 'B' due to my ineptitude at guessing the contents of his mind. ;-) I still have fond memories of that teacher, who was also my next-door neighbor, but he taught his students to be "reflectors of other men's thoughts," rather than "thinkers."

It takes some humility and courage to effectively teach our children to be "thinkers, rather than reflectors of other men's thoughts."