
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 9, 1993                   TAG: 9309110260
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SELF-ESTEEM

KIDS AREN'T dumb. They can spot a phony from a mile away. They see right through it when adults patronize them with insincere interest in their efforts and activities. They don't suffer fools who offer gratuitous praise and speak with forked tongues.

So it's not surprising that feel-good campaigns to boost children's self-esteem aren't working in many schools the way educators had hoped they would.

As The New York Times reported recently, teachers have been dishing out blarney so indiscriminately that he kids are saying "Yuck!" to that.

Said Carole Kennedy, principal at an elementary school in Columbia, Mo., "Where teachers often go astray is, the praise is not congruent with the effort the child is putting forth."

Say, a teacher lavishes outrageous praise on a little boy for reading his lesson. The boy, knowing it wasn't hard to read the lesson, gets the message that the teacher must think he's really stupid. (Or else, he thinks the teacher is nuts.)

"You can't simply achieve self-esteem [in children] by using the label or rewarding any effort regardless of its quality or merit," says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Praise without merit simply acknowledges mediocrity.

Indeed, some teachers themselves complain that they feel so compelled to stroke kids' egos, that praise has become meaningless, and true achievement is no longer distinguished from mediocre performance.

"In some instances, you accept work you shouldn't accept because there is the fear that the kids will not feel good [if their work is rejected]," says one New York teacher. The puffery "is a crock," says another in New Mexico. "It has lessened the appeal of hard work among students."

Worst, educators complain, the push for self-esteem in students is helping to sustain trends of grade inflation. When teachers in an Albuquerque, N.M., middle school tried to establish an honor society for students with grade-point averages higher than 3.5, they found that two-thirds of the students qualified - about half of them enrolled in a special-education program.

Encouraging words from teachers can work wonders in inspiring kids to develop their brainpower to full potential, and to strive to reach higher and higher academic goals.

Moreover, too many studies have documented how schools shortchange some students - girls and members of minority groups, particularly - by deflating their egos and lowering the youngsters' expectations for achievement.

Some programs do seem to wqrk: Where the relationship between self-confidence and hard work is kept in focus, the result has been stronger student performance.

So hold the feel-good sweet-talk for when it can be sincerely given for what's sincerely deserved. Kids know blarney for what it is: baloney.

by CNB