Building Self Esteem: How to
Self esteem is created from and built upon one’s abilities to perform. If I do everything for my grandchildren, to take an obvious example, such as anticipate their needs rather than do the work of making them verbalize their needs in a polite and complete form, I set them up for failure and for low self esteem. Everyone has an innate “crap detector”–pardon my language–which tells them the truth. A child will think, “If others are doing it for me, they (my significant adults) are convinced that I cannot do it for myself.”
I think we can agree that a reasonable performance “burden” is necessary to move us all out of our too-comfortable but entertaining ignorance and passivity.
Thus, teachers are and have been handicapping our students by building falsely high self-esteem based on thin air, a fact verified by world-wide self esteem/competency testing done over the last 30 years. We have made the feedback loop so warm and fuzzy it has enveloped learners with a security blanket made of cotton candy…utterly useless and in fact detrimental. Why detrimental? Inept individuals ooze confidence, according to Erica Goode, New York Times article “Why the ignorant are blissful”.
“One reason, she writes, “that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.” Tell me, then, exactly how one becomes aware of one’s incompetence if not by the truth–spoken in love. Let me know what you think about this: http://www.zenspider.com/RWD/Thoughts/Inept.html.
