The Fallacy and Tragedy of Self Esteem

Go Ahead, Hurt My Feelings
By Tucker Carlson

HOW IMPORTANT is self esteem? Several years ago, the state‑sponsored California Task Force on Self‑Esteem decided to find out. Researchers viewed the literally thousands of available studies on the subject. In the end, says author Maureen Stout, here’s what they found: “There is little or no correlation between high self esteem and a reduction in teen pregnancy, drug use, violence in schools.”

In other words, telling kids that they’re wonderful and terrific may make them feel good, but there’s no evidence it makes kids behave better or achieve anything.You’d think this fact, that a central assumption of American life is false, would make headlines, forcing legislators and educators to rethink their positions on self esteem. You would be wrong. The doctrine of self‑esteem has, if anything hardened into a national orthodoxy. In 21st century America, hurting a person’s self‑esteem is more than rude. It’s considered morally wrong in some places, it’s virtually illegal, or at least actionable.

One night last fall four seventh‑graders at Ridgefield Academy in Connecticut broke into their school using a stolen key. The boys swiped food from the cafeteria stole from the band room, threw eggs at a school bus and left a kitchen knife lying on school grounds. The following day they bragged about what they had done. A few days later, they were expelled.

In a way, the boys were fortunate the school did not press charges. Far from being grateful, however, the parents of one boy were outraged at the treatment of their son, claiming among other things‑that he had been “harassed” and “defamed.” They sued, seeking monetary damages for treatment that caused their son “feelings of unworthiness” and left his “self‑worth impugned.” In a society in which self‑esteem is the highest value, the reaction made sense: The boys may have committed a crime against their school, but the school hurt their feelings. Hence, the boys were the real victims.

Will this sort of lawsuit multiply? When it’s an issue of self‑esteem, some schools don’t want to take any chances. In Rhode Island, officials at Barrington High School determined that it would be wrong to bar a student from the school’s track team, even though the boy is confined to a wheelchair. Last spring he competed with able‑bodied runners in the 100 meter dash.

The feelings police are ever vigilant, and you can see why. There’s hardly an event in American life that couldn’t make someone feel uncomfortable. Holidays are the worst. Residents of a housing project in Portland, Maine, were told to remove all celebratory decorations from public areas of the building around the month of December. Why? Because signs proclaiming “Happy Holidays” might make some people feel excluded. School bus drivers in Maine have been banned from leading Christmas carols on the same grounds.

And it’s not just religious holidays that threaten to hurt feelings. Celebrations of Valentine’s Day, an obvious emotional minefield, have been banned by some schools. In Manhattan, the Rodeph Sholom Day School went so far as to eliminate Mother’s Day. Not everybody, it turns out, has a mother at home. Some have two fathers. In light of this, school administrators explained in a letter to parents, Mother’s Day “may not be a positive experience.”

Entirely true.

Not all of life’s experiences are positive. Many are downright unpleasant, even painful, and always have been. What’s new is the attempt to prohibit those experiences. An article several years ago in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation &Dance, for instance, argued that many traditional children’s games‑dodge ball, kickball, musical chairs, red rover, tag and duck, duck, goose, to name a few‑are competitive, exclusionary, and therefore bad for a child’s self‑esteem. You can guess what happened next. (In case you can’t, ask a school‑age child when he last played kickball, or if he has even heard of it.)

What’s wrong with this? It’s misleading, for one thing. You can spare a child the supposed agonies of duck, duck, goose, but you can’t change the fundamentally hierarchical nature of the world. Real life is ranked: The smartest, hardest working and most talented come in first.

It’s called meritocracy, and it’s not so much an ideal, as an expression of the way things really are. Pretending a person has accomplished something may increase that person’s self esteem, but it doesn’t mean he has accomplished anything. This is one of those lessons best learned young.

In the early 1990s, researchers decided to test the effects of self‑esteem by measuring how high school students perceived their own academic ability. Students were asked to agree or disagree with the statement “I am good at mathematics.”

As it turned out, the more highly students thought of their ability, the less ability they had, and vice versa. Kids in Washington, D. C., ranked first in the country in self esteem‑fully 28 percent considered themselves quite skilled in math but came in second to last in actual performance. Students in North Dakota, meanwhile, came in first on math tests, but ranked at the bottom in self‑esteem.

In other words, years of self-love propaganda succeeded only in producing self‑deluded kids. Surprised? You must be an educator.