Quote of the day
Feewings. Nothing more than feewings:
I am absolutely sick and tired of the very phrase “Self Esteem”; embodying as it does the concept that one should have warm fuzzy feelings about one’s self for no adequately explained reason whatsoever, as though by simply existing, one was doing something inherently good rather than merely converting oxygen into greenhouse gas.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:32 am
I like Stuart Smalley about as well as I like Al Franken.
Tam does a good job with this riff, “You’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough…
…and gosh darn it, people don’t like you.”
May 30th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Please stop!, before I get my hammer and hit myself with it!
May 31st, 2007 at 11:02 pm
As I recall, the big push for “self esteem” came out of the public education circles back in the 1970s and early ‘80s, and my take on it goes like this:
Schools weren’t teaching kids stuff, or disciplining them. Without knowledge and discipline, the kids lost interest in school.
Being left-wing geniuses, the school administrators and teachers figured that the low interest level (which they created) was actually caused by the low self esteem (which they created due to their inability to teach). So rather than blame themselves, they blamed low self esteem, and set out on a campaign to improve our kids’ self esteem.
Now we have kids who think highly of themselves, while being ignorant and undisciplined. Perfect: More Leftists. Repeat as necessary…
A similar phenomenon occurs whenever some teachers decide their building isn’t nice enough or new enough, or when a local contractor decides he needs a great big contract: “The kids aren’t learning because they don’t have a new building, and therefore don’t have a proper learning environment, yakity yak yak”.
Hence in both cases: Poor student performance is either the students’ fault, the parents’ fault, or, more often, it is caused by a lack of “resources”, but it never, ever, ever has anything to do with teacher performance or university education department standards, or the fact that our public education system is essentially a Soviet-style, socialist mess in a desperate search for a real reason to exist.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering where is the Magic Source of true self esteem? It has to do with a little thing known as “accomplishment”. Ask a capitalist– a good many of them know about this illusive concept. Really.