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Schooling and Self-Esteem

When a culture turns away from God, such as our own has done, it becomes rootless. It does not stand for anything and so falls for everything. Each generation is subjected to the latest "bright" idea--particularly ideas about human beings, family, marriage, an raising children--that comes down the pike. Then within a generation, the unintended side effects of these "trendy" concepts begin to show up, and society says, "Oops. That was a bad idea". But by then the damage is done.

One really bad idea in our generation has been the notion that children must have their self-esteem constantly reaffirmed and reinforced. This has led to a praxis in the home and in the classroom of constantly affirming children, and minimising criticism--particularly telling children and pupils they are wrong, or allowing them to fail. But now the results are showing up from a generation's application of this half-baked idea to children. They are not good.

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald documents the problems and the emerging consequences.

The belief that regular praise will improve the self-esteem of students has backfired, with educators urging over-anxious parents to let their children fail so they can learn from their mistakes. Parents were also doing too much for their children who were becoming less resilient and unable to cope with failure. Some were even too scared to put up their hand in class and risk giving the wrong answer.

As new research shows that members of Generation Y are entering the workforce with an inflated sense of their abilities, principals are warning ''helicopter parents'' against putting too much pressure on children to be successful, which could discourage them from risking failure.

One Sydney principal has stated bluntly that the principle of educating to build a child's self-esteem is the most damaging educational concept that has ever been thought up.

Rod Kefford, the headmaster of Barker College, has warned: ''We are creating a generation of very fearful learners and the quality of our intellectual life will suffer as a result.''

Today's students are let down lightly by teachers and wrapped in cotton wool by some parents. But in the 1960s, it was not uncommon for teachers to tell students bluntly that they had given a wrong answer.

''Then someone invented the concept of self-esteem,'' Dr Kefford said. ''In some ways it has been the most damaging educational concept that has ever been conceived.
''We couldn't do anything that would upset or harm the self-esteem of students, which was very fragile, we were led to believe … That is when we stopped our proper work in the character formation in young people. If we are serious about building resilience, we have to let them fail. It is only through our failings in the learning process that we learn anything.'' He said schools needed to give children the confidence to risk failure to encourage more creative thinking.

A generation of pampered, cosseted, self-indulged children are now entering adult life. They are failing!

''[Through] this fear we have of ever allowing them to fail, we are selling them short as human beings and as future adults,'' he said. One of the first empirical studies on generational differences in work values shows Generation Y or the ''millennials'' (born between 1982 and 1999) are entering the workforce overconfident and with a sense of entitlement. The research, led by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University and published in the Journal of Management, shows this generation wants money and the status of a prestigious job without putting in long hours. When they do not get the marks they expect at university or rise quickly enough in their jobs, they turn into quitters.

''More and more students are reaching university not knowing how to do things for themselves. Parents think they are helping young people by doing things for them but they are actually making them less independent,'' Professor Twenge said.

''It is now common for parents and teachers to tell children, 'you are special' and 'you can be anything you want to be'.'' While such comments are meant to encourage students and raise their self-esteem, experts say they can inflate students' egos.

''Feeling special often means the expectation of special treatment,'' she said. ''Your parents might think you're special but the rest of the world might not. This can be a difficult adjustment.''

Our parents raised a previous generation on the maxim, "Spare the rod and spoil the child". Our generation has reversed this, replacing it with the faddish, "Spoil (aka, build self-esteem) the child, and spare the rod." The fruits of this indulgence are now becoming evident.

Successful parenting and educating must above all be grounded in honesty and integrity. When a culture turns its back upon God, honesty and integrity quickly become seen as old-fashioned concepts, well past their use-by-date. Instead, parents and teachers want to be loved and liked and replace tough, honest love with cheap psycho-babble "love" which denies their children access to the truth that hurts, but also builds character and resilience and appropriate self-respect that does not tolerate in oneself a perpetual narcissism, believing that the whole world exists to serve me.

We thank God that He has delivered us, through His Son, from such folly and self-deceit.

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Three New Partial Scholarships Awarded

Donations for scholarships have continued to come in to the ACS Endowment Trust. As a result the Trustees have been able to award three partial-fee scholarships to pupils this term.

This is in addition to the two full-annual fee scholarships awarded, and a donation from the Trust's income of $4,500 towards funding the multi-child discount. The Trustees wish to thank our generous donors.

Please contact Geraldine if you know a person or business interested in making a contribution to the Endowment Trust.

All contributions are fully tax-deductible.

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The Term I, Newsletter 2, 2010 . . .

has just been published. Read it here:

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Two Full Tuition Scholarships Awarded

Owing to the generosity of some private anonymous donors, the ACS Endowment Trust has been able to award full fee tuition scholarships to two pupils at Manukau Christian School for the 2010 school year.

This is in addition to the $4,500 annual grant to MCS general operating expenses which the Trust will make to the School this year.

The Trustees wish to thank the donors for their generosity and support of these two pupils and of the School in general.

Donations to the Endowment Trust are fully tax deductible.

If you wish to assist with providing full or partial scholarships to present or potential school pupils, please contact Geraldine.

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Solving Non-Existent Problems

Background:

Two years ago, the Law Commission, in response to a request from Green MP Sue Bradford, undertook to review the law relating to private schools. The role of the Law Commission is to review older legislation with a view to updating, modernising, and rationalising. In due course, the Law Commission published an extensive review of the law relating to private schools.

The Commission acknowledged that substantially the law as related to private schools was working well and there were no substantial or systemic problems with the operation of private schools in New Zealand. Nevertheless, many of there recommendations sought to address what the Commission saw as potential or possible problems in the years ahead. The Commission's recommendations largely sought to solve problems which do not exist.

At the end of 2009, the Ministry of Education undertook a process of consultation with private schools, seeking comment from them on the recommendations of the Law Commission. Specifically they were interested in how practical, expensive, or feasible some of the recommendations were likely to be.

The document reproduced below is the response of MCS to the Ministry of Education. It provides useful insight into how the gradual imposition of state education bureaucratic management is likely to strangle the private school sector in New Zealand.

The Submission of MCS:



What Happens Next?

The Ministry of Education is considering all the responses of private schools to the Law Commission's recommendations. It will in due course decide whether to put the amending of the law with respect to private schools on its work agenda. Even if the current government were to decide to let the matter lie because it had more pressing and urgent business to focus upon, we expect that some government, some time in the future will take this matter up again.

Eventually, a bill will be put to the Education Select Committee, and submissions will be sought from the public. MCS will make additional submissions at that time. In the meantime, we are thankful that the present government appears far more supportive of private schools and the cost-effective contribution they make to the education industry in New Zealand than was the previous government.

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Good Counsel

At the end of last year, 2009 a survey seeking evaluation of key aspects of the MCS programme, and general comments, advice, and suggestions was sent to all parents of the School.

The questionnaire is reproduced here:

Responses are compiled, together with summary comments and suggestions, here:

Thanks to all those who took part, and for all the thoughtful and helpful comments and suggestions. They have already set us thinking and planning along some productive lines.

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Another Great Year Begins

As the 2010 school year commences, MCS has published the first edition of the 2010 Newsletter.

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Archbishop Laud Redivivus

The Emmanuel Evangelical Church in Southgate, North London is planning a Family Conference in March this year.

The promotional blog post provides a snapshot on the state of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the UK today. The picture is not pretty.

Emmanuel Evangelical Church Family Conference
13 March 2010

Christian families are under mounting pressure from the secular world. Anti-Christian dogma is promoted in the media under the guise of ‘tolerance’. Education has become a battleground, and increasingly intrusive legislation is being proposed by our government. Recent proposals have included:

* ‘Parents will lose the right to withdraw their children from sex education classes once they reach 15.’
* ‘Home-educating parents will be forced to register annually and undergo criminal record checks.
* ‘Home-educated children will be interviewed privately by government officials; parents who refuse to allow this will find their children sent to a state school.’

Pressure is also mounting elsewhere:

* The British Humanist Association has declared that ‘there probably is no God,’ and demanded that Christian parents stop raising their children as believers in Christ.
* A BBC presenter speculated that ‘authoritarian’ evangelical parents could use home education as a cover for child abuse.

Yet there is always hope. Jesus Christ is the risen and ascended King of Kings. He has received from the Father all authority in heaven and on earth, the nations have been made his inheritance, and one day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Until then, the church has been commissioned to maintain the unity of the Spirit, to live as children of light, to speak the truth in love, to nurture our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and to disciple the nations.

Are you ready for the challenge?

Good question. Are we in NZ ready for the challenge? It is virtually inevitable that the same moves will be made in New Zealand in the next fifteen years.

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Liberal Arts Education is Not For Everyone

Douglas Wilson

There is not really a delicate way to get at one of the root problems with modern higher ed without confronting the emotional engine which drives those problems. And when we confront that engine we discover that the problem is caused by the atomosphere we all live in, and not by this or that nefarious educrat. The kind of colleges we have are plants that grow in the kind of soil that we as a people provide.

We have those who have given themselves over to this vice completely, believing it to be a virtue. . . . The evil can be described as a clustered bundle of problems that I will call by the general name of egalitarianism. The cluster is made up of envy, ressentiment, democracy, sentimentalism, and what Charles Murray calls educational romanticism. One obvious consequence of the problem is the notion, now prevalent in our nation, that every kid should go to college. But the reality is that far too many are going to college as it is, and if we had really good guidance counselors working in our high schools, we could cut the number in half.

But in order to make this point I have to distance myself from Aristotle first. He taught that the purpose of what we would call a liberal education was to equip a free man to be a free citizen, and what we would call vocational education was education for slaves -- mere training. But his point, some of which we must recover, had far too low a view of the honorable nature of vocational labors in the sight of God.

In another post, I will develop what the Protestant Reformers recovered in their vision of the dignity of all lawful work in the sight of God. God has made certain men for certain ends, and it is their job to find out what those ends are, and to labor joyfully in what God has equipped them to do. In short, with regard to the Puritan work ethic, we have no untouchables. All laborers, from the dairy farmer to the backhoe operator, from the backhoe operator to the librarian, from the librarian to the fish and game specialist, from the fish and game specialist to the software code guy, from the software code guy to the long haul truck driver, all of it is honorable before God. In every lawful vocation, we have the privilege of being Christ to others, and in our dependence on the vocations of others, we receive the gifts of Christ to us with gratitude. More on this later.

I say this because I am about to say that some people are more able than others. Even though God created us with aptitudes that are equally honorable, He did not create with aptitudes that are equally capable. Some people are brighter than others, as in "more intelligent," and this stone cold reality should be reflected in the education we seek to provide to them. It means, bottom line, that most people should not go to college. "College for all" is an idolatrous pipe dream, one that wants to ignore certain creational realities.

Almost thirty percent of American 25-year-olds and higher currently have a B.A. If true educational reform in higher ed takes root, over the course of a generation, we should be able to cut that number in half. If we don't cut that number in half, we will continue to "cut in half" our educational expectations. For example, if we said that our goal was to send every eighteen-year-old to basketball camp, and in the grip of a bizarre ideological frenzy, we insisted that we were going to reach the achievable goal of "every American learning how to dunk the ball," then there are only two possible outcomes. The first will be that reality will eventually set in, and we give up that fantasy, admitting that it was a fantasy. The second is what we are currently doing, especially in the humanities, and that is the achievable goal of lowering the net.

When we send kids to college who are not capable of doing the work, then two irreconcilable forces are pressing against one another, and one of them must give way. Either the historic liberal arts curriculum will give way, or the practice of herding warm bodies into college will give way. Over the last generation or so, it has been the curriculum that has given way -- through grade inflation, through cheating, through abandonment of core curriculum, and so on. When that happens, something invaluable is lost. When it doesn't happen, the unfortunate student who ought to be somewhere else learning how to do something else well is continuously exasperated by the challenge of something he cannot really do.

This means that colleges that are engaged in education reform have to be prepared to turn away customers who (in the grip of our broader culture's propaganda on this) are insisting on applying, and they have ready money in their hands. But while the Church takes all comers, the choir doesn't, if you follow my meaning.

This is an enormously practical question, and in order to address it, we have to answer the question in ways that show that we are being accountable to external realities. "For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise" (2 Cor. 10:12).

If someone gathered up (at random) a group of 100 average American high school students . . . that I could speak to them, I would regard it as my duty to try to talk half to three quarters of them out of [a college education]. But notice that I said "random." If they were a group of 100 A-students from a first rate classical Christian school, it would be more likely that I would only try to talk a quarter of them out of it -- a certain amount of self-selection has already occurred. But if they are anything like their fellow countrymen, their applications have predictive value.

Much more needs to be said on all this, but preparation for life is not a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. There are many things that a liberal arts education . . . cannot do, and there are many people for whom we cannot do what we can do for others. A liberal arts education at the higher level is not for everyone. More than that, it is not for most.

If someone rejects what we offer because they have bought into the technocratic prepare-you-for-a-job paradigm, we want to subvert that paradigm, and we want to recruit as many capable students as we can. But if someone does not apply [for a liberal arts education] because it is clear that God has equipped them and made them for something else, then God bless them all. If the majority of Christian parents are not passing by [what what a tertiary liberal arts education has] to offer, then we are not doing our job.

Posted by Douglas Wilson, 28th December 2009 Douglas Wilson is a pastor of Christ Church, in Moscow Idaho. He is the author of numerous books. He is actively involved in primary, secondary, and tertiary Christian schools. This post first appeared in his blog, Blog and Magblog.

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Holy Ghost Industrial Grade Sandpaper

Douglas Wilson

I have being writing on distance learning, and how, while it provides some important things, like information, it is utterly incapable of providing other things, like how to deal with people. In a learning community, in a school or college, your fellow students are people, your teachers are people, the administration is made up of people, and, as it turns out, so is the board. And just to make things more interesting, we have to reckon with the fact that all these people are sinful people, who have not yet attained to the perfections they will display on the day of resurrection. And, more's the pity, neither have we attained to that blessed state.

But living in believing community is one of the central instruments that a loving God has given to us to prepare us for that great day. Living among fellow sinners, learning how to deal with it properly, is the principal form of industral grade sandpaper that the Holy Spirit uses on us. But many pietists, including many educational perfectionists, withdraw from that treatment, shrinking from it, and all in the name of maintaining their smooth surfaces. But hiding the rough cut lumber in an unlit shed is not the same thing as sanding.

Allow me to come at this from another angle, and address for a moment what I consider to have been one of the top blessings that our family benefitted from as our three children wound their way through their many years at Logos School and New St. Andrews College. It was the blessing of countless micro-battles with their classmates; it was the blessing of learning how to stand up against unhelpful peer pressure, as well as the flip side of this, which is the lesson of learning how to exert godly peer pressure.

It is important to note that these are micro-battles with Christian kids in superb Christian schools, and with other kids who will grow up to be fine communicant members of orthodox Christian churches. These are micro-battles in learning leadership, not macro-battles with orcs.

One time after he graduated, my son was talking with some boys at Logos, and he asked them what the current hot movie was among their peers. They told him, and naturally it was some atrocious thing or other, I forget which one. He then asked them what this told them. The answer was that "their standards are not very good." Nate replied that what it really said was these boys who were disapproving of those standards weren't the leaders in their class. If they were leaders, some of the kids would still go off and watch Screen Gunk, but they would be ashamed to bring it up to their class -- because of all the hooting that would follow.

Over the years, I have observed class after class at Logos, and -- with regard to this issue -- you can put a bell curve on every class. Every class has a bunch of kids who "get it" and bunch of kids who "don't get it." Now remember that a bell curve is a relative thing -- the kids who "don't get it" at Logos are not in the same class with the kids who "don't get it" in some inner city school where the teacher has to teach from behind a cage.

The character of each class as a whole is determined by which half of the bell curve the leaders are in. The kids with some force of personality or charisma will fall on one side or the other. If the leaders are among the kids who don't get it, the kids who get it don't evaporate, but they do keep their heads down. If the leaders are among the kids who get it, the kids who don't get it don't evaporate either, but they do keep their heads down.

This is how classes determine their class character. The leadership may be formal, and it may not be. Sometimes the class president, the one who organizes the parties, is the spiritual thermostat for the class, but not necessarily.

Now, at Logos, there are classes where the kids don't take full opportunity to learn what it means to lead, shape, and direct in the way they ought to learn it. The lesson is available to learn, and is right there on the surface, every day. Nancy and I spent years debriefing the kids at the dinner table, talking about what to do on the playground when this happened, and what to say in the classroom when that happened. This included dealing with biblical failings in teachers sometimes, as well as among fellow students, and it meant dealing with failings in our own kids. "Next time something like this happens . . ."

In order for this to work, the parents have to have a genuinely open relationship with the kids, and in order to have that, the parents have to have the full and complete loyalty of their kids. We are in this as a family, and we deal with it as a family.

Like I said, the fact that this profoundly important lesson can be learned in a good Christian school doesn't mean that it will be learned. It sometimes isn't, and the opportunity flies past. But when a student gets his education from books and an online tutor, the opportunity is never there. This lesson is not in the curriculum at all. There is a difference between a missed opportunity and a non-existent one.

As I have mentioned before, NSA is a college that is friendly to and supportive of applicants who have not come to us from a traditional school. Many have come to us from distance learning situations, and we are the first place they have been in where the student next to them physically has a winsome face, and after class suggests that they go and do something perfectly idiotic. Now a number of these students who have come to us have been superb students, and have done quite well. But there have been more than a few who don't have any earthly idea about the biblical way to stand up to someone, about anything.

This would not have been fixed if their parents just enrolled them in a good school. It might not have been. But it would have been fixed if their parents "enrolled in the school with them," if you know what I mean, and the dinner table every night was a jolly place for roast beef, mashed potatoes, friendship, laughter, casuistry, ice cream, and all followed with Narnia readings.

Let me finish with one illustration of the kind of thing you should be looking to create. One time when our youngest daughter Rachel was in junior high, we let her go to a youth group event at another church with a friend from school. In the course of the meeting, one of the songs was "Spring Up, O Well," containing the verse about the blood of Christ, along with all the splish-splash hand motions. Our kids knew that, as far as our family was concerned, that kind of thing was, as my girls would put it, "not okay." The youth leader noticed that Rachel was not participating, and so he called her out -- Rachel needed to get into it more, and so they were all going to sing it again, with Rachel leading in all the hand motions. And so Rachel refused, the youth leader pressed it, and she said that she couldn't do it because it was disrespectful. This is the kind of thing you are after, and I can't remember the number of times our kids had the occasion to exhibit this kind of backbone.

Many would say that our kids must be full of beans anyhow, and so the whole thing must be dependent on the luck of the draw. Yes, our kids are full of beans, and that means they know how to throw down. But what we are talking about here is one of the principal glories of education, which is that learning how to throw down with biblical standards and in biblical ways. And that is found, not in the luck of the draw, but in the words, "That was good, son. Next time . . ." If you want a sample of that kind of inspired dinner table conversation, look to the book of Proverbs.

If we had been in a situation where our kids were doing distance learning (which parents who are in that kind of situation should do), a central part of their education would still have gone missing.

Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog 19th December 2009

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