DB's Response to Wall Street Journal

Regarding the Friday April 18th 2003 article: Real Self-Esteem Builds on Achievement, Not Praise for Slackers

I understand and agree that artificially boosting self-esteem has been misleading and perhaps in some cases harmful. However, I think to be balanced, an article such as this one should acknowledge the great benefit of the self-esteem movement. The movement put 'inner psychological well being' on the political map. It proposed that many of our society's behavioral problems are related to if not caused by unhealthy psychological structures. It connected the dots: how a child learns to be her or his self, effects their ability to be effective participants in everything they do in school and later in life. What the self-esteem movement did was direct our attention to what is developing on the inside of our children - not just because it was a profoundly good thing to do, but also because the economic cost of the behaviors of psychologically unhealthy persons is so staggering. The underlying fulcrum equation is solid: if we spend x dollars helping children develop more healthy selves, we will get it back many times over in social expense savings.

The question was how to do it. I think we went wrong when we formulated self-esteem as something to 'build up'. I think what we have learned is that, quite the contrary, self-esteem is a lack of building up. It is not about boosting the accumulation of positive feelings, self-imagery or self-concepts, its about minimizing the accumulation of negative feelings, self-imagery and self-concepts. More and more we are coming to see that we human beings would naturally gravitate to healthy psychological well being if we didn't learn otherwise.

The following link leads to a dialogue on self-esteem in which California Senator John Vasconcellos (the original architect/leader of the self-esteem legislation that started it all in California) myself and a number of other thoughtful and diversely talented people further flesh out this conversation:

for all children

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#19 David's response to the WSJ Article on Self Esteem