The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem [Paperback]

Maureen Stout (Author), Ph.D., Maureen Stout (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2001

The so-called self-esteem movement-a progressive, child-centered, discovery model of schooling-has transformed schools into therapeutic clinics and teachers into counselors, creating a generation of entitled, righteous, underachieving children. An insider's account of the pernicious aspects of this seemingly well-meaning movement, The Feel-Good Curriculum provides devastating evidence that our belief in the power and importance of self-esteem in education is misplaced and without basis.Avoiding political posturing and political correctness, The Feel-Good Curriculum identifies the four specific effects of self-esteem's stranglehold on our schools-narcissism, emotivism, separatism, and cynicism. It prescribes antidotes to them-empathy, rationality and morality, connectedness, and skepticism-and offers a hopeful view of educational philosophy for the next millennium. Professor Stout urges us to replace our coddling, indulgent approach to building self-esteem in children with a sense of authentic self-confidence developed from intellectual, physical, and moral effort and achievement.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Maureen Stout isn't the first to attack self-esteem boosters in public schools, and she won't be the last. The question is: Do such creatures actually still exist? Stout, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at California State University-Northridge, uses many of her graduate students to illustrate the fallout from the self-esteem movement, which hit its heyday in the 1980s and early '90s. She portrays her pupils--tomorrow's teachers--as spoiled brats who can't spell and feel entitled to grades they haven't earned. Her fellow professors are painted as bovine, unoriginal thinkers. It doesn't instill much confidence in the future of our education system--but it's not meant to. Stout attacks the basic tenets of the self-esteem movement, blasting it for lowering expectations, belittling competition, and turning schools into centers for therapy, not learning. She blames "feel-good curriculums" for everything from road rage to the abuse defense used by the parent-killing brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez. Her argument is scattered at times, but it remains passionate throughout. While many self-esteem programs have fizzled under similar harsh criticism, the mindset still pervades our public schools, Stout contends. She lists a number of "red flags" and questions for parents to ask of their schools so they can monitor their own children's education to see if self-esteem exercises are endangering another generation of young minds. The Feel-Good Curriculum will confirm the fears of many and outrage the rest. --Jodi Mailander Farrell --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In a country where every other auto bumper bears a sticker proclaiming that the driver's child is an "honor student," this attack on the "empty and very dangerous" concept of self-esteem couldn't be more timely. An education professor at California State University-Northridge, Stout traces how the ideology of self-esteem developed from early 20th-century progressive schooling through the influence of educational psychology to what she views as the current "idiotic" idea that school should be a kind of therapy. Along the way, she excoriates a number of educational fads and theories, including "whole-language," Ebonics, emotional intelligence and Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences. Stout reserves her harshest criticism for those who teach teachers, arguing that today, "almost every aspect of public schooling, including evaluation, standards, curriculum, and class environment, reflects the goals of the self-esteem movement," and that its worst effects have been on language and literacy. Identifying four major symptoms of the "addiction" to self-esteem--narcissism, separatism, emotivism and cynicism--Stout raises serious questions about the reasons for the current state of public education in the U.S. Unfortunately, her arguments are often weakened by reductive treatments of history and the theories of those she disagrees with. At times, she writes in a dated style ("It is reason that has permitted man to create civil societies") and is occasionally given to wild exaggerations, to the point of appearing to blame the self-esteem movement for murder. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738204358
• ISBN-13: 978-0738204352
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,119,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Non-educator's Opinion, April 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Feel-good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem (Hardcover)

Maureen Stout's book, The Feelgood Curriculum: Dumbing Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem will amuse and bemuse readers alike, whether or not they are connected with the educational community. Stout makes several valid points in support of her argument(backed by research) that self-esteem promotion for the sake of stroking egos and making people feel better about themselves is not only futile, but also counterproductive. She follows several studies of self-esteem and their inability to produce meaningful results in support of self-esteem curricula, but indicate that self-esteem curricula encourages narcissism and entitlement. On the surface, her text appears very cynical and a harbinger of doom and gloom, however in the last 1/4 of the book she identifies possible solutions. Her remedies, however fall short as she appears to have put forth more effort in her research and discussion of shortcomings.

Readers may identify themselves, classmates or their children as they read accounts of people Stout has encountered, sensing an entitlement to better grades, educational opportunites and accolades which they have not won.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, June 6, 2004

By 

Kate Smart "Private" (Private) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem (Paperback)

If you are interested in how the self-esteem movement has insinuated itself into the public school system, this is the book for you. Unlike other books about education, this one is thoroughly engaging, well-written, and even amusing.

Particularly interesting, is the chapter on teacher training. Having survived the ordeal myself, it was truly a relief to read that I was not alone in being appalled by the relentless focus on self-esteem, making sure the kids are "having fun", and the importance of not behaving in a "teacherly" fashion; after all, we are there to "facillitate learning", not stand infront of the class and actually say something.
The silent majority of parents, who are outraged by the wholesale rejection of traditional education, needs to stand up and make their objections known.
The classroom has become a gong show.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Educator Has No Clothes, August 14, 2001

By 

Wayne W. Berninger - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Feel-good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down Of America's Kids In The Name Of Self-esteem (Hardcover)

Does success follow as a natural result of feeling self-esteem (what Stout defines as "feeling good for no good reason"), or does self-esteem come from challenge, hard work, and success? Anyone who has been in a classroom recently (on either side of the desk) will recognize the author's description of what passes for education these days. While she puts too much faith in the idea that school ought to transmit traditional values (which sounds like code for blind religiosity and blind patriotism), Stout's argument is compelling: Americans have allowed the difficult work of learning to be replaced by such feel-good options as "cooperative learning" and "child-centered classrooms," theories that place a premium on the self-esteem of students and avoid anything (competition, grading--especially failing grades, authority itself) that may lead anyone to think that some ideas are better than others, that some people are more sooner capable than others, or that judgment of any kind about anything may actually be OK. No knee-jerk reactionary, Stout acknowledges the gains that our educational establishment has made as a result of many progressive ideas; for example, it has been no great loss that schools are no longer organized as in the 19th C., when students never spoke unless spoken to and literally had to "toe the line" drawn on the floor when they stood to answer questions, but she rightly worries that the current emphasis on how students "feel" about learning makes it difficult for real learning to take place.