Name: The Feel-good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem
Author: Maureen Stout (Author)
ISBN: 9780738202570

The Feel-good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem book cover

The Feel-good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem

Author(s): Maureen Stout (Author)

Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
Publication Date: January 6, 2000
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 336 pages
ISBN-10: 0738202576
ISBN-13: 9780738202570

Book Description

The so-called “self-esteem movement”—a progressive, child-centered, discovery model of schooling—has transformed schools into therapeutic clinics and teachers into counselors, creating a generation of righteous, entitled, underachieving children. An insider’s account of the pernicious aspects of this seemingly well-meaning movement, The Feel-Good Curriculum provides devastating evidence that our belief in the power and importance of self-esteem in education is misplaced and without basis.Avoiding political posturing and political correctness, The Feel-Good Curriculum identifies the four specific effects of self-esteem’s stranglehold on our schools—narcissism, emotivism, separatism, and cynicism. It prescribes clear antidotes to them—empathy, rationality and morality, connectedness, and skepticism—and offers a hopeful view of educational philosophy for the next millennium. Professor Stout urges us to replace our coddling, indulgent approach to building self-esteem in children with a sense of authentic self-confidence developed from intellectual, physical, and moral effort and achievement.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Maureen Stout isn’t the first to attack self-esteem boosters in public schools, and she won’t be the last. The question is: Do such creatures actually still exist? Stout, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at California State University-Northridge, uses many of her graduate students to illustrate the fallout from the self-esteem movement, which hit its heyday in the 1980s and early ’90s. She portrays her pupils–tomorrow’s teachers–as spoiled brats who can’t spell and feel entitled to grades they haven’t earned. Her fellow professors are painted as bovine, unoriginal thinkers. It doesn’t instill much confidence in the future of our education system–but it’s not meant to. Stout attacks the basic tenets of the self-esteem movement, blasting it for lowering expectations, belittling competition, and turning schools into centers for therapy, not learning. She blames “feel-good curriculums” for everything from road rage to the abuse defense used by the parent-killing brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez. Her argument is scattered at times, but it remains passionate throughout. While many self-esteem programs have fizzled under similar harsh criticism, the mindset still pervades our public schools, Stout contends. She lists a number of “red flags” and questions for parents to ask of their schools so they can monitor their own children’s education to see if self-esteem exercises are endangering another generation of young minds. The Feel-Good Curriculum will confirm the fears of many and outrage the rest. –Jodi Mailander Farrell

From Library Journal

The title and subtitle of this passionately argued and fluidly written attack on contemporary education philosophy and practice says it all. According to education professor Stout (California State Univ., Northridge), the root problems of American education can be traced to the tragically mistaken belief that self-esteem is a primary goal of education. She maintains that self-esteem should instead flow from a student’s substantive achievements. Her targets are the usual suspects that “back-to-basics” adherents attack: Ebonics, Carl Rogers, social promotion, identity politics, moral relativism, and the Montessori Method. To support her position, she refers to the works of many critics of today’s education and culture, including Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Technopoly. Although she hits home with some of the colorful subtitles of her chapters (“Psychoanalysis and Education: A Marriage Made in Hell”) and scores points against some of the absurdities of how progressive education is practiced today–such as social promotion, overmedication with Ritalin, and racial separatism–Stout is prone to overgeneralizations (e.g., “Americans have always been an isolationist people and tend to look inward for answers”). Provocative but short on solutions, this is of primary interest to professional educators and future teachers and of secondary interest to educated lay readers.
-Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

This analysis of a controversial trend in American educationthe gearing of public schools in the 1980s toward teaching self-esteemis all but doomed by its lack of focus and poor organization. Stout (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies/California State Univ., Northridge) is certainly capable of lucid intellectual history, as she shows in her accounts of the progressive school movement of the 1800s and the rise of “discovery learning” and the “open curriculum” in the 1960s. But she is never able to do the same for what she calls “the self-esteem movement.” After differentiating real self-esteem (based on tangible achievements) from false self-esteem (based on uncritical self-regard), Stout immediately abandons this distinction to launch into a slash-and-burn critique of every educational practice she attributes to the self-esteem movement. She hits all the popular targetsgrade inflation, cooperative learning, social promotion, multiculturalism, Ritalin, poststructuralismyet never makes a historical connection between any of these practices and the promoters of self- esteem, writers she never even names until her final chapter. In the end, Stout’s greatest problem is that she has become what she beheld. Though she criticizes the self-esteem movement for its narcissism, she is relentlessly self-indulgent, peppering her analysis with pointless glimpses into her personal life. (Why do we need to know that her Victorian literature teacher hated women and flirted with men?) While decrying the “victim mentality” bred by self-esteemers, she portrays herself as a culture-wars martyr, badgered by her students who expect As for subpar work and reviled by her ed-school colleagues for her resistance to their constructivist methods. Despite championing the cause of intellectualism over “emotivism,” Stout lets her anger bleed onto virtually every page, producing a document equally flavored by rant and whine, with just enough social history to let the reader taste what might have been. — Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

“a fascinating and provocative discussion of the impact of the ‘self-esteem movement’ on American education.” — Choice, July 2000

..a scorching new book… — Judith Schlesinger, The Baltimore Sun, January 9, 2000

..couldn’t be more timely…raises serious questions about the reasons for the current state of public education… — Publisher’s Weekly, January 10, 2000

About the Author

Maureen Stout is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the California State University, Northridge. She received her Ph.D. in Education from UCLA and has degrees from the University of London and the London School of Economics. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

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