The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing-Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem

In a country where every other auto bumper bears a sticker proclaiming that the driver's child is an ""honor student,"" this attack on the ""empty and very dangerous"" concept of self-esteem couldn't be more timely. An education professor at California State University-Northridge, Stout traces how the ideology of self-esteem developed from early 20th-century progressive schooling through the influence of educational psychology to what she views as the current ""idiotic"" idea that school should be a kind of therapy. Along the way, she excoriates a number of educational fads and theories, including ""whole-language,"" Ebonics, emotional intelligence and Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences. Stout reserves her harshest criticism for those who teach teachers, arguing that today, ""almost every aspect of public schooling, including evaluation, standards, curriculum, and class environment, reflects the goals of the self-esteem movement,"" and that its worst effects have been on language and literacy. Identifying four major symptoms of the ""addiction"" to self-esteem--narcissism, separatism, emotivism and cynicism--Stout raises serious questions about the reasons for the current state of public education in the U.S. Unfortunately, her arguments are often weakened by reductive treatments of history and the theories of those she disagrees with. At times, she writes in a dated style (""It is reason that has permitted man to create civil societies"") and is occasionally given to wild exaggerations, to the point of appearing to blame the self-esteem movement for murder. (Feb.)