August 20, 2003
Dear Concerned Citizen,

Does feeling good about yourself make you do better in school? That is one of the conclusions drawn by advocates of multiculturalism. Their premise is that the traditional Western curriculum makes minority and female students feel ignored and left out. They argue that the result of such exclusion is an injury to self-esteem and an impediment to the academic achievement of women and minorities.

So there are lots of programs to boost the self-image of students, and not just minority students. One such program is Outcomes Based Education, which downplays grades and other measures of merit and instead focuses on such things as maintaining “emotional and social well-being” or developing “a positive personal self-concept.”

Self-esteem is a democratic idea. In a hierarchical society one’s self-image is determined by one’s role: as patriarch, as brahmin, as elder, and so on. Aristocratic societies do not speak of self-esteem but of honor.

In a democratic society, self-esteem is regarded as an entitlement. Unlike honor it doesn’t have to be earned. Self-esteem in the West is largely a product of the romantic movement, which exalts feelings over reason, the subjective over the objective. Self-esteem is based on the wisdom that Polonius imparted to Laertes: to thine own self be true. We are encouraged to discover and then affirm our inner selves.

But does a stronger self-esteem make students learn better? I am not so sure. I’m the product of a Jesuit education, and I know that institutions like the Jesuits and the Marines have for generations produced impressive results by first undermining the self-esteem of recruits, and then seeking to reconstruct it on a new physical, mental and spiritual foundation.

A few years ago something called the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem (yes, there really is such a group) did a study. It found, to its own evident disappointment, that self-esteem does not improve academic results. Indeed one of the findings was that American students consistently have higher self-esteem but lower reading and math scores than students from other industrialized countries. What we have here is self-esteem unsubstantiated by intellectual achievement.

In the last couple of years there have been several studies exploring the relationship between self-esteem and academic performance. What they find is that it is not self-esteem that produces enhanced achievement. Rather, it is achievement that produces enhanced self-esteem.

In short, feeling good about myself doesn’t make me smarter. But when I study hard, when I discover the meaning of a poem, when I find the ameba under the microscope, when I see my way through a difficult math problem, then I feel exhilarated, then my self-esteem is justly strengthened. That’s a lesson that educators should take to heart.