Colleges Eliminating Self-Esteem Courses

Something that should give would-be education reformers pause but probably won’t: when ephemeral education fads finally come in for much-needed criticism, they have already done their damage. Case in point: the self-esteem courses popular 15-20 years ago.

“Raising it in isolation was counter-productive,” Martin West, an associate professor of education at Harvard said at the Brookings Institution on March 31, 2015. West is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.

He was chairing a panel on “Incorporating noncognitive skills into education policy.” “Education is very faddish and there’s a danger that the fads will catch on and have unintended consequences,” Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, on the same panel, said.

For his part, Whitehurst avers that schools should stick to “noncognitive skills” such as “making eye contact, being polite and dressing appropriately.”

“A whole field of behavioral psychology is devoted to changing things that are unbelievably hard to change,” Chris Gabrieli, a lecturer at Harvard said. Gabrieli is also co-founder and chairman of a group called Transforming Education. Interestingly, Garibaldi finds that the non-cognitive skill most likely to guarantee future success is self-control. He cited a study of students in Dunedin, New Zealand that pretty much came to that conclusion.

What makes that finding particularly ironic is that it tracks with the urgings of Eighteenth Century philosopher Adam Smith.

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