Elf-esteem
What is it about these times and this topic that make an old post still seem relevant?
Ed’s note: On 8 February 2007, I published the following note on my blog, Teach Effectively. Looking back at the post, I thought, “Dang, there’s some ideas here that are still going ‘round!” So, I’m republishing it here (essentially unedited (though I moved references to the end and separated them from the body with a heading).—JohnL
Writing in the Washington (DC, US) Times, Paul Greenberg commented about Arkansas’ new governor, Mike Beebe, who objected to schools sending reports to parents about their children’s body mass index. In his column, entitled “Self-Esteem to the Extreme,” Mr. Greenberg used Mr. Beebe’s expression of concern about harming children’s self-esteem as the launching pad for deriding the idea of promoting self-esteem.
Remember self-esteem? It was one of the sillier — and more dangerous — fads in educational circles, which keep going round and round. The theory was that promoting kids’ self-esteem would convince them they were great. And it just might. But that’s no guarantee they are great.
I was glad to see that Mr. Greenberg presented reservations about self-esteem. He is right when he says it was a silly fad and (later in his column) that it went away only to lurk in the background and then return to prominence. That cycle—unwarrented popularity, academic and scientific negation, disappearance, re-emergence—is common in education, as it is in fashions in clothing. My friend Barb says it’s a 30-year cycle.
However, I was discouraged by Mr. Greenberg’s failure to debunk the self-esteem idea more thoroughly. We educators too often accept the idea that the high self-esteem of high-achieving students is the cause of their achievement. So, we seek ways to raise the low self-esteem we see among low-achieving students, hoping that doing so will improve their motivation and consequently raise their achievement.
Nice idea. The reasoning seems solid. But, it doesn’t work. Roy Baumeister (a psychologist who has devoted most of his career to scientific study of self-esteem) and colleagues published a very thorough analysis of this nice idea (and related ideas) about self-esteem and found it wanting. Here’s a quote from the abstract of one of Professor Baumeister’s papers:
The modest correlations between self-esteem and school performance do not indicate that high self-esteem leads to good performance. Instead, high self-esteem is partly the result of good school performance. Efforts to boost the self-esteem of pupils have not been shown to improve academic performance and may sometimes be counterproductive.
I suspect that if there is a causal relationship between achievement and self-esteem, it operates in the opposite direction than the commonly held view. That is, I suspect that when students achieve highly, they feel good about themselves. If they repeatedly accomplish tasks, especially tough ones, they develop a strong self-concept, high self-esteem. They get to the point where they can say, “I can do things. I am effective.”
Our job, then, is to teach them well so that they do accomplish things.
Link to Mr. Greenberg’s commentary. I found an article in which Mr. Beebe is quoted as objecting, on the grounds of “unintended negative reactions, self-esteem-wise,” to the plan to send BMI data to parents. Link [now dead] to the Arkansas New Bureau story about Mr. Beebe’s support of efforts to repeal legislation authorizing collection and dissemination of children’s body mass index.
References
Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/1529-1006.01431
Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2004). Exploding the self-esteem myth. Scientific American, 20 December 2004.
Interested readers can follow this link to the see the original post in context on Teach Effectively. (P.S., I have nothing against elf; they are fun, magical creatures of our imagination, and we should forget that that’s what they are…like self-esteem?)