Andrew Sullivan the other day approvingly linked to a Peter Suderman post on The Corner ripping apart the so-called “self-esteem movement”:

Interestingly, the article reports that, surprise surprise, even young kids are pretty adept at spotting false praise, and that power-blasting fake praise at kids actually ends up reversing the incentive structure.

Outrage over children with high self-esteem is probably 10 years too late (Kurt Cobain died in April of 1994, and since then teen esteem seems to be doing alright). That said, it’s worth noting this outrage is a bit misguided.

Self-esteem based education isn’t some sort of process by which educators heap false praise on undeserving kids in order to foster a distorted sense of self-worth; that’s kind of dumb, and clearly doesn’t work. Improving childhood self-esteem is all about encouraging kids to explore activities and attack problems using approaches that match their learning style, and then (honestly) praising their accomplishments. It’s all about positive reinforcement, not false reinforcement. Kids learn and behave differently, and education should be geared toward emphasizing those individual methods by which kids are successful (in everything from math to recess) and should reward kids for doing good work.

Conservative opposition to the “self-esteem movement” seems largely based on a lazy interpretation of how self-esteem learning works; almost a straw-man argument based on worst possible practices.

It’s a misconception similar to the way conservatives often reduce affirmative action to a matter of employers hiring unqualified black people just because they feel bad about racism. Which isn’t really the case; affirmative action is all about employers looking beyond what they would normally consider the employment pool in order to find good people they wouldn’t have otherwise even considered, due to a number of institutional factors that stem from a legacy of racism in this country (less access to elite schooling, etc.).

Sure, some employers are lazy and hire the first handful of black folks that come their way just to satisfy a quota, just as some teachers are lazy and heap false praise on their students rather than working with those kids to find methods that fit their learning style. But this is the fault of lazy individuals, not a misguided “movement.”