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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
We spend way more time than everyone else trying to make kids feel empowered, and worthy, and self-confident, to the point where we even changed the basic theme of elementary ed to "we doan' need no stinking drills!" Too many kids weren't memorizing their eights and nines, and so, the philosophy holds, to continue to emphasize the drills would be too damaging to kids' self-esteem. I think that we DO need to do things that make kids feel able and useful and valued, but there's a balance that needs to be found. We're not there yet. Problem is, getting there won't happen until the education community regains some diversity - too many ed students from the last twenty years of ed college are so firmly settled into the anti-drill-and-basics mode that we'll need to wait, first, for the current ed school philosophy to switch back to valuing knowledge as much as self-esteem, and then for the grads of the new outlook to start taking over the field.

Clearly, by 2060, we'll see a start. Until then, anyone with kids needs to handle that very basic educational-system function themselves. We've done the drills with the kidlets since time began, and now, as the kids start entering non-elementary schools, they're consistently getting A's and B's. I can testify, after some long struggles to get our ADD kids out of the score basement, that there are few ways more effective to raise a kid's self-esteem than to give them the tools to start succeeding - like, drill them in math in the basics so they have a foundation to learn the more advanced stuff. (Trig is tough if you have to stop and figure out nine times seven.) The whole "teach self-esteem" movement simply wants kids to feel like they've succeeded without having to take the time and trouble to actually succeed.

I live in one of the leftier places in the country, and the school district my kids are in bears little resemblence to what bilmore describes above, which makes me suspect this "teach self-esteem movement" is the same sort of guide to educational policy that Trading Places was to trading commodities futures.