Jay Tea has some thoughts on the USA today article that came out yesterday.

Here’s a bit of the article.

“At the time my children were raised, we were suffering from a misguided notion that healthy self-esteem results from something extrinsic that tells you you are a good person,” says Betsy Brown Braun, a child development specialist in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and the mother of 26-year-old triplets.

It wasn’t limited to the West Coast. Raising self-esteem became a national concern, and educators thought it could help raise academic achievement.

But schools got sidetracked into worrying more about feelings, says Charles Sykes in Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add. “Self-esteem has virtually become an official ideology,” he writes.

And Jay’s reaction:

USA Today has an article about a study that the big push towards boosting children’s self-esteem of the 80’s wasn’t such a good idea, after all. Apparently now that those kids are growing up and finding out that not everyone will blow sunshine up their butts and praise them to the high heavens. Reality is crashing in on their tender little egos, and it’s proving very painful.

Ever since I first heard about this notion, I’ve thought it was insane. Protecting children from criticism and failure and judgment while they’re children simply renders them unable to deal with it when they’re adults, and makes it a far harsher lesson.

And on a somewhat related note, Ambra Nykola points readers to this WND article:

A master’s student at a New York college was kicked out of the graduate education program because of what officials claim was a “mismatch” between his personal beliefs and the goals of the program.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, a nonprofit group, the trouble began when Le Moyne College master’s student Scott McConnell wrote a paper that advocated “strong discipline and hard work” in the classroom and an environment that allows “corporal punishment.”

I think they really should have been a bit more considerate of the self-esteem and feelings of Scott McConnell before they kicked him out.