Primrose Road

There's an article in this quarter's Skeptic magazine about some of the causes and effects of the "positive thinking" movement in American culture that for the most part rehashes previous arguments about self-esteem and The Secret but presents some interesting facts about the self-esteem movement in the classroom. Author Steve Salerno notes that psychologists found that while students in three Asian countries had stronger academic skills, students to whom they were compared in the United States "expressed much higher self-appraisals." The self-esteem movement may have simply made students feel more confident about poor academic skills and destroyed their ability to self-appraise, a skill that educational psychologists have shown is actually important to academic performance.

I remember several years ago taking a course within the composition program at my university's English department and students presenting unreflectingly positive reviews of a book that suggested that grading was akin to violence. At the same time, I was taking educational psychology courses and learning about research that shows that teaching is most effective when clear objectives are set and evaluated as quantitatively as possible. Though grading, when not used correctly, can indeed serve as a method of punishing students who do not enter the classroom with a certain skill set, I wonder if the grading-as-metaphor-for-violence idea instead comes from a concern that grading simply doesn't feel good.

Self-esteem feels good. Of course, as any competent psychologist will tell you, what feels good isn't always good for you; in fact, psychological treatment itself can often be unpleasant. While I think that we do need to eliminate the correlation between standardized testing and funding and socialize our public schools a bit more so that every child actually does have the opportunity to start from the same place, I at the same time do not believe that holding this view means that I must also buy into the idea that if it feels good, it is good. Policy in this case needs to be left up to educational psychologists, not self-esteem pushers and people with ideas about metaphors.