Being "Special" vs Being "Good Enough"

The "self esteem" movement in our schools represents something of a "bait and switch" for our youngsters and some of our social pathologies stem from their resulting confusion.  Recently, John McWhorter wrote an approving review of Stuart Buck's Acting White (which I have not read).  As McWhorter puts its, Buck brings together a great deal of relevant data:

Guilt Trip

In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist.

...

Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the “acting white” charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people’s unusual social history in America—and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.

As Buck notes, anecdotal accounts from blacks attacked for thinking they are “white” now constitute a crushing volume of testimony in countless newspaper articles over decades (as well as in the hundreds of unsolicited attestations I have received since Losing the Race). As Buck acknowledges, the plural of anecdote is not data, and yet we can be assured that certain parties would consider much less than this volume of testimonies of racist “slights” as invaluable evidence that America remains a deeply racist country.

I will not repeat in detail the argument, which is in essence that desegregation has placed many black children into schools with white power structures and that this lead to the wide spread belief that any black child who works hard and does well is trying to succeed under terms dictated by that power structure.  To this way of thinking black children in segregated schools could succeed because they were surrounded by other black children trying to succeed rather than white children who had too many advantages for the black children to overcome.

Steve Sailer adds his won distinct perspective on the data and suggests that the explanation is, at best, incomplete, and misses some salient detail:

Acting White—Or Acting Smart? Stuart Buck's New Book Can't Explain Education Gap

Are blacks held back by fear of "acting white"?

No doubt this is often true. Yet the benefits that whites bestow upon blacks for acting reassuringly white (for example, the White House itself) are so lavish that it’s hardly certain what the net effect is. As Buck admits, when unsuccessful blacks denounce successful blacks for "acting white," there’s an obvious whiff of sour grapes about the proceedings:

"Indeed, in one of the earliest scholarly accounts of ‘acting white,’ one of the poorer black students was remarkably frank about how he viewed the more accomplished black students in his class: ‘There're just a few of these Uncle Toms at school, these are the goody-goody guys. Maybe I say this, though, because they're doing a little bit better than I am. And maybe I'm a little bit ashamed of myself because I'm not doing as good as they are in school, and I'm jealous. Maybe that's why I think of them as Uncle Toms.’"

One peculiarity of this popular "acting white" theory: there is significantly stronger evidence that a lack of intellectual ambition holds back otherwise capable Hispanics (especially Mexican-Americans) than that it debilitates African-Americans. But that never seems to come up in public discussion—probably because, as I’ve argued before, Anglos just find blacks much more interesting than Latinos.

Steve Sailer goes on to sow that even greater than the failure of blacks to avail themselves of academic opportunities, Mexican Americans are even more likely to eschew "acting white."  He offers a deft explanation for the lack of Mexican-American achievement by noting the flow of successful Hispanics into the Middle Class and attributes much of the failure in educational aspiration to the birth and growth of the black power movement:

McWhorter writes:

"I even sense from the testimonials I have received that if one particular year could be pegged as the time in which ‘You think you’re white making those grades?’ ‘tipped’ as a community commonplace, it would be 1966—perhaps because this was the year that ‘black power’ ideology went mainstream in the black community."

The birth of the Black Pride movement around 1966 meant that the African-American Talented Tenth switched from emphasizing their cultural whiteness to emphasizing their cultural blackness: there was now good money to be made in acting black.

But this meant that the manners of the black masses were no longer upbraided by starchy black upper class role models, like Carlton Banks on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

For example, one of the main characters in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full,is mild-mannered Roger White II, a black lawyer and Stravinsky devotee. He is known to his Morehouse college fraternity brothers, including the mayor of Atlanta, as Roger Too White. By the end of the book, even Roger Too White has figured out that the real money and power in modern Atlanta is in representin’.

White people will pay well to employ blacks who can act white—but as long as whites and blacks insist on assurances that the blacks are "authentic", racial tensions will continue. 

And the black-white educational performance gap is likely to continue even longer.

What is missing in these discussions is the impact of the movement for teaching "self esteem" by always offering effusive praise while never tolerating distinctions to be made that might hurt someone's feelings.  Note the time course mentioned in this wikipedia entry:

Self-esteem, grades and relationships

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s many Americans assumed as a matter of course that students' self-esteem acted as a critical factor in the grades that they earn in school, in their relationships with their peers, and in their later success in life. Given this assumption, some American groups created programs which aimed to increase the self-esteem of students. Until the 1990s little peer-reviewed and controlled research took place on this topic.

The concept of self-improvement has undergone dramatic change since 1911, when Ambrose Bierce mockingly defined self-esteem as "an erroneous appeasement." Good and bad character are now known as "personality differences". Rights have replaced responsibilities. The research on ego centrism and ethnocentrism that informed discussion of human growth and development in the mid-20th century is ignored; indeed, the terms themselves are considered politically incorrect. A revolution has taken place in the vocabulary of self. Words that imply responsibility or accountability — self-criticism, self-denial, self-discipline, self-control, self-effacement, self-mastery, self-reproach, and self-sacrifice — are no longer in fashion. The language most in favor is that which exalts the self — self-expression, self-assertion, self-indulgence, self-realization, self-approval, self-acceptance, self-love, and the ubiquitous self-esteem.^{[cite this quote]}

— Ruggiero, 2000

Peer-reviewed research undertaken since then has not validated previous assumptions. Recent research indicates that inflating students' self-esteem in and of itself has no positive effect on grades. One study has shown that inflating self-esteem by itself can actually decrease grades.

That the determinants of self esteem are primarily unconscious and that parents and teachers who expressly set out to enhance self esteem by curtailing criticism and offering an abundance of praise generally end up enabling the development of pathological self esteem (eg, most violent criminals have wonderful self esteem; they feel terrific about themselves and have little sense that what they are doing is problematic) is germane. 

When all children must be "special" none of them can be; further, if being "special"  is the base line (as in Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average)  who could possibly tolerate the shame of being merely "good enough"?

Our self esteem mantras have led a generation of children to either convince themselves, or pretend to believe, they are special and wonderful in all sorts of unique ways.  When cruel reality (failing a high school math test or noting that a school mate is obviously more gifted) intervenes, the child feels, quite reasonably, that they were lied to; the more limited their academic ability the greater the lie.  Bobby is better at school than Timmy and they both can't be academic stars, just as, despite all our efforts to avoid keeping score, children know when Alan is a far better athlete than Peter.  By insisting that all children are "stars" in the face of overt reality, children end up feeling that if they are not at the top of the class their value to others is limited; they then look for other places in which to establish their value.  In the most pathological settings, once academics have been surrendered, that value comes from instilling fear in others and being the toughest "gansta" in the school yard.

Not all children can be stars (although all should be to their families, as long as some decent approximation of reality is recognized) and by failing to educate our children to reality, we close off many alternatives that could be available to them.

In suburban New York, for example, there is a terrible dearth of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians.  These are high paying jobs that can be extremely rewarding yet because we have taught our children that such jobs are for those less educated (synonymous with smart) such jobs go begging as more and more children try to fit their square selves into the collegiate round holes that offer them nothing but unhappiness and debt.

Our self esteem culture has over-valued words and academic success and under-valued those who actually create and do things.  Unless we begin to redress this imbalance we will have a growing cohort of ignorant, poorly educated young people, unable to adequately compete in a globalized market place, unable to support themselves, unaware of their various ignorances, and unhappily coming to the recognition they have been sold a bill of goods.