evolution

In my last post on the marginalization of boys in public schools, Katie (herself a Wichita Eagle employee) left this comment, which I excerpt for you here:

The best explanation for my underachieving generation that I could ever find was that through all of elementary school, teachers slathered on the “you can be anything you want to be! you have infinite potential! you don’t have to know what you want to be when you grow up right now, but someday you’ll be awesome!” self-esteem schpiel nice and thick. But I don’t have any memory whatsoever of any teacher ever giving us a hint at how to accomplish the vague goals that we were assured we’d one day develop. I don’t think I came up with a serious goal for myself, by myself until I was 22. It took until my senior year of college before a teacher finally sat me down and made me actually think about what I was going to do with my life.

We don’t have public schools so that kids can all be taught to pass state-mandated exams. We have public schools so that kids can be taught how to function in society. Except that they don’t have much time for that anymore.

And here are the results of that program of self-esteem boosting:

NEW YORK - Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

“We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough already.”

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.”

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students’ NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people “or auditioning on ‘American Idol.’”

“Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others,” he said.

The study asserts that narcissists “are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors…” [snip]

Kari Dalane, a University of Vermont sophomore, says most of her contemporaries are politically active and not overly self-centered.

“People are worried about themselves — but in the sense of where are they’re going to find a place in the world,” she said. “People want to look their best, have a good time, but it doesn’t mean they’re not concerned about the rest of the world.”

Besides, some of the responses on the narcissism test might not be worrisome, Dalane said. “It would be more depressing if people answered, ‘No, I’m not special.’”

As I said, the angle in my original post was the marginalization of boys in public schools. Although Katie is clearly not a boy, she has hit on something. The public educational experience has not left young people prepared to function in society. The boutique multiculturalists (which include most leftists, what I call the “racial pressure groups”, “Second Wave” feminists, and also the “Christian right”, which lately is indistinguishable from the preceding groups) will argue that it is society itself that is deficient and needs to be rebuilt (in their image, of course). I say there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our society. As with any collection of people so large, there are problems — even major problems requiring complex solutions. I maintain that the structure for a successful society is there, and that the answer is that our children should be taught a certain common set of core fundamental skills — not quite the “three R’s” but something similar; the key is that the set is broadly applicable and deep — along with a limited array of elective topics as students get older.

Social skills are a key component of that; a student who has been puffed up without justification all of his or her life will not be able to deal with the inevitable setbacks in life, nor will he or she be able to construct a logical argument and defend it against another logical argument rationally. True confidence and self-esteem come from competing and winning*, and it is this at which we have become deficient. When these common skills are taught, kids entering the “real world” will have some expectation of what they will encounter — and quietly become more confident (and justifiably so). They will not need puffery from people they may one day eclipse in accomplishment.

Boys are, of course, more susceptible to this puffery — and the resulting over-confidence and narcissism — than are girls. And we see from the study above, assuming it was done properly, that things that hurt boys also hurt girls — who will want relationships with those dysfunctional boys someday.

I’m afraid we’re setting ourselves up for a fall in America: when we get old, and this dysfunctional generation takes the reins — and we ask them to bear the weight of our impossible socialized retirement (and possibly health-care) schemes — that they’ll want out. What they leave will be fundamentally different — and probably worse — than what we left them. We have only ourselves to blame.

*: Again, as I said in my last post on this topic, I’m not talking about “dog-eat-dog” social-Darwinist competition. This is where the teacher comes in — to allow competition, much like a referee in sports, in such a way that the competition is fair and no one gets hurt. I don’t want it to sound like I despise cooperative-teaching methods; they have their place, but eventually one must learn to do for oneself.