stimulant

This type of constrained-language exercise was way more successful with my analysis of opportunity, right, responsibility, privilege, and duty. But, this post has been sitting in the pipeline for weeks, clogged. It’s not clear if there’s a quick wrap-up to this, and I’m concerned that this conceit is weak. But, here it is. Please, criticism is encouraged!

To return to “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, let’s take a look at a couple of sentences that caught my eye:

The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

For quite some time, many have raised reservations about the so-called “culture of praise” that dominates school. Backed up by solid research of psychologists like Carol Dweck and documented in our schools by works like Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, there is a growing backlash against the prominence of self-esteem in educators’ thinking.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a trend in the debate on education reform that has shifted the focus from the moral and philosophical to the psychological and political dimensions of education. Use of the language of philosophy and human rights has been supplanted by strategic arguments predicated upon developmental psychology and political currency. The outrage has been at our educational institution’s failure to teach students, not at the manner in which they propose to succeed. Even if the institutions themselves are attacked, their aims are not. This presents a thorny situation for those interested in education reform: it is possible for two people to vehemently want the same changes in schools for [philosophically] diametric reasons, raising the question of conscionable collaboration. Bringing some of this vocabulary back into the discussion has a lot to offer our thinking about “self-esteem.”

Before going further, let me explicitly define self-esteem, confidence, empowerment, and security. Keep in mind that these are artificially constrained definitions, concocted for the purpose of use in this post.

• self-esteem: the belief that others think well of you, allowing for you to think well of yourself
• confidence: the belief that others should think well of you, that you are entitled to think well of yourself
• empowerment: feeling capable in one or more domains
• security: faith in one’s value or potential value in all domains

It should be immediately clear that as defined, self-esteem and confidence are fundamentally different creatures than empowerment and security. It is sloppy (but convenient) for me to suggest they are on the same continuum by calling them comparable. In doing so, some may think that it is possible to move up this set of inequalities, from self-esteem to confidence to empowerment to security. I actually think when people try to lay the groundwork for others’ self-esteem and confidence (particularly in children and students), they sabotage their personal development of empowerment and security. As defined, self-esteem and confidence are necessarily determined by an external locus of control1, and this often ends up meaning that immersion in an environment that [hyper]focuses on these aspects of someone’s life (e.g. school) leads to significant personality shifts supporting and perpetuating a mindset characterized by an external locus of control.

Anecdotally, this is manifest in the close agreement between Carol Dweck’s work and what I see daily at MIT: namely, students who are accustomed to success becoming not only intellectually unadventurous, but extremely insecure and emotionally fragile in the context of the perceived academic abilities and success. For those unfamiliar with Dweck’s work, take a look at the following summary of one of Dweck’s characteristically stark experiments, from a recent feature by Po Bronson in New York Magazine, entitled, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids”:

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.” […] Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out. […] In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.” Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

These habits of mind are common in MIT’s undergraduate population. From strategic class-shopping to fabricating personal and family problems so that Student Support Services can write a note to get an extension on a problem set or a rain-check on a test, MIT undergraduates are heavily emotionally invested in their academic and mental self-image.

This is not to say that the small pond/big pond transition does not occur; that is, many students do come to MIT and find that they are no longer at the top of their class, and have difficulty dealing with this. Consider the Facebook group, I am Sorry For Taking a Spot at MIT That Belongs To Someone Else:

Did you ever get the feeling that after looking at your test scores, the professors wonder why or how you got into MIT in the first place? Did you ever feel like you took a spot here at MIT that should have gone to someone better qualified? This is the group for you.

Despite this, and despite many MIT students’ pathological habit of intellectual self-deprecation, most MIT students are extremely fragile creatures when it comes to admitting that they don’t know something. Recently, I ran a discussion seminar addressing a number of issues in education. During one of the discussions a seminar attendee (and successful, straight-A student) commented that one of the hardest parts of taking back her intellectual autonomy from school was relearning how to achieve validation without teachers and grades. Even when the work wasn’t particularly interesting, there remained a significant pressure to please and excel, even within a framework she explicitly acknowledged as broken and perverse!

Consider the following excerpt from an article written for the MIT Faculty Newsletter by recently-retired Dean of Admissions of MIT, Marilee Jones, entitled, “New Kids on the Block”:

[MIT students] need praise and positive feedback. At MIT, we put too much stock in perspiration and not enough in inspiration. Because we think analytically for living, it is often hard to keep that skill, designed for the world of ides, from spilling into our social discourse. We can inadvertently become critical of ourselves and others. These students serve to remind us that we adults hold a special responsibility to encourage these future leaders of the world with words of kindness as we teach them the ropes.

I disagree with Jones’s diagnosis of why praise and encouragement are often absent from education,² but more pertinently, it is dangerous to meet a perceived need for praise with praise. A steady of diet of praise can preclude the development of empowerment and security, as we’ve defined them.

While I’ll postpone a fuller discussion of Jones’s article, I think that working with these narrow definitions of self-esteem, confidence, empowerment, and security gives us a chance to work out in which direction we want to proceed when faced with school’s various perversions of self-image.

1. Essentially, the idea behind locus of control is to make relevant the perceived seat of power in a situation. The most common contradistinction made is between situation or personalities that tend to see external versus internal loci of control, meaning that someone will feel as though events or emotions are outside of their control. As an element in the social theory of personality and learning, the idea has figured prominently in discussions of motivation qua reinforcement. For an example of the concepts’ use in thinking about the education of children, take a look at this paper [↩]
2. It’s a conveniently flattering reason: “We habitually fail to give students praise because we’re too rational.” It’s a line of reasoning that caters to the strange mix of expertise and arrogance that can accompany identifying as a “smart person.” More to the point, this would imply that the personalities of faculty and staff differ fundamentally from those of students. I see no reason to predict this disparity; furthermore, my own experience does not support this explanation. But, this is irrelevant to our purposes. [↩]