Overdosing On Oprah

NRO: The Side Effects Of Empowerment

(National Review Online) 
Though many of the consequences here are easily missed or confound measurement, the literal and figurative poster children can be found in America's schools, whose crusade to imbue kids with that most slippery of notions,self-esteem, has been plainly disastrous. It was once theorized that a rose-colored self-image would itself help students achieve greatness, even if the mechanisms required to instill self-worth undercut traditional notions of scholarship. In the intervening years, declining SAT scores and the generally dismal performance of American students in global rankings of competency in math and the hard sciences have shown that academic greatness is not what self-esteem promotes. (In 1998, the Amsterdam-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement released its Third International Mathematics and Science Study, involving twelfth graders from 23 nations. In overall scientific literacy, the U.S. placed fourth from the bottom, besting only such historic hotbeds of scientific innovation as Lithuania, Cyprus, and South Africa. In advanced math, the U.S. outpaced only Austria. In physics, American kids finished dead last.)

No matter. America keeps filling its children with this faux self-esteem, passing them on to the next set of empowering standards, and the next after that. If you teach college, as I do, you are certain at some point to be confronted by a student who's upset over the grade you gave him and seeks redress because, he will say, as though his point were self-evident, "I'm pre-med!" Only if and when that student actually reaches med school does he encounter less elastic standards: a comeuppance for him, but a reprieve for the rest of us, who otherwise might find ourselves anesthetized beneath his second-rate scalpel.