What sort of sicko would question the removal of potentially deadly allergens from schools? How could anyone oppose a plan to foster self-esteem in children? And who would dare challenge anything labelled “inclusive”? It turns out, these contrarian roles are too often only taken up by the last line of defence between pernicious social mania and whole generations of children.
History is unambiguous. Adults with the best intentions, but who haven’t done the hard work, keep doing ruinous things to kids. Moderately concerned parents keep letting it happen. And it is up to those of us who see through the madness to stand up.
Consider the self-esteem movement. What sort of misanthrope would oppose this splendid idea? Very few did challenge it during its prime in the 1980s and 1990s. You can bet the independently minded fellow who demanded to see evidence that giving every kid at athletics day the same ribbon and praise was called names. But that was just the start.
As The Critic puts it “The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation — millennials — was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favourably). As it turned out, the central claim underlying the trend, that there’s a causal relationship between self-esteem and various positive outcomes, was almost certainly inaccurate.”
Low self-esteem
We can trace the craze back to the efforts of one man. John Vasconcellos was convinced that low self-esteem among kids was the root of all manner of social ills and evils, ranging from unemployment and crime to child abuse and gangsterism. The Democratic state legislator from California bulldozed his plan through. He claimed he had evidence.
Vasconcellos put together a task force to explore self-esteem. Unsurprisingly, he found evidence that backed up his model. It was all contained in their final report, Toward a State of Esteem, published in 1990: good self-esteem was correlated to far better outcomes than poor self-esteem. Vasconcellos had done it. I mean, the handsome governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, and Barbara Bush sure thought so.
The Guardian captures what followed:
“Four months after the launch of Toward A State Of Esteem, the papers were reporting that self-esteem was ’sweeping through California’s public schools’, with 86% of the state’s elementary school districts and 83% of high school districts implementing self-esteem programmes. In Sacramento, students began meeting twice a week to decide how to discipline other students; in Simi Valley, kids were taught, ’It doesn’t matter what you do, but who you are.’ Political leaders from Arkansas to Hawaii to Mississippi began considering their own task forces.”
The liberal The Guardian goes on to concede “Vasco became a devotee of the human potential movement, based partly on the Rogerian idea that all you need to do to live well is discover your authentic inner self.” This was the “you can be anything you want to be” era. And it was folly.
Steve Baskin explains in Psychology Today, “The parents who embraced these efforts did so out of love and with the most noble of intentions. The only problem is that these efforts simply do not work. Self-esteem is not something conferred, it is earned through taking risks and developing skills. When children stretch themselves, they expand their sense of their own capability and then feel confident to tackle the next challenge. Confidence comes from competence – we do not bestow it as a gift.”
Immoral and unproductive
Sure, we can all work hard and get better at anything. But IQ matters. Personality traits matter. And telling a teenager with an unimpressive intelligence he can be a great physicist is immoral and unproductive. He can’t. He can have a fantastic life. He just can’t be a successful physicist.
Vasconcellos’s plan backfired. Here I’ll refer you the brilliant Will Storr and his book Selfie. The British journalist and author captures two things convincingly. First, the evidence in favour of the self-esteem revolution was pathetic. Some was vague correlation. Some was fictional causation. And second, honest people who did their investigations saw through it all. From the start. Telling kids they’re wonderful all the time without tethers to reality does them no good.
The self-esteem movement was a shortcut. But nothing valuable comes easy. Creating opportunities for kids to thrive is hard. Seeing some fail is devastating. Helping them dust off defeat and keep hunting for their purpose takes all the power an adult can muster.
A nuts idea
The humble peanut was the source of panic that set off another mania. Some people are allergic to peanuts. In vanishingly rare cases, this terrible affliction leads to the death of a child. That is a horror too frightening to imagine. However, the well-meaning response from adults in the late 2000s was worse than the disease.
An all-out ban on peanuts at schools, summer camps, and kiddies’ party venues was rolled out after the US national media ran rampant with several deaths. It seems likely this policy response prevented some deaths. Unfortunately, nobody ever had good evidence it would prevent more deaths than it caused.
It turns out – by which I mean, we have known for centuries – that we have to be exposed to allergens and germs and other harms in order to learn to deal with them. For the majority of kids, it is critical that they be exposed to peanuts. It may cause a modest or even nasty response. But that is how their bodies learn to deal with peanuts. Unless, of course, well-meaning grown-ups panic and stop their investigations after one study that validates their fears.
You see, kids are “anti-fragile”. That is the term so brilliantly derived by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He applies the phenomenon chiefly to investing. He likes assets that get stronger when markets get rattled. The very same applies to kids. Within limits, of course. Kids have to fall off of jungle gyms. They must get bullied. If they don’t get chicken pox now, it will be far worse if they catch the illness as adults.
Parents and teachers and doctors who signed up to cancel peanuts had the best intentions. They did not do enough of the hard work. They did far more damage than they prevented.
Allergies surging
American academic and commentator Jonathan Haidt explains: “Peanut allergies were surging precisely because parents and teachers had started protecting children from exposure to peanuts back in the 1990s. In February 2015, an authoritative study was published. The LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study was based on the hypothesis that ‘regular eating of peanut-containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.’”
None of this is to argue that the alternative to these disastrous policies is always and everywhere nice. Certain, infinitesimally rare death by allergy is sombre. The truth that some youngsters just have far more ability in important areas than others is unfair. It is not to say that there is nothing that can be done. Only that any intervention has to be based on robust reading of quality evidence.
That demands we do lots of boring, difficult work. We have to read academic papers, scrutinise popular media, think deeply, and be willing to challenge our own models of the world. Delivering talks and announcing policies that sound lovely is easy. Anyone can quote Martin Luther King Jr. Anyone can claim they are being “inclusive”. And even the weakest among us can sprout the faux intellectual fad of the day – #DiversityInclusionEquity.
Today it is gender and race that well-meaning parents, teachers, politicians, and administrators are obsessed with. They claim they have evidence. They word their policies so that only a bad man could oppose them.
Today’s gender radicals will tell you that a boy who feels like what he thinks it feels like to be a girl is a girl – for all purposes. They’ll demand he share showers with your daughter. And they’ll try to convince you that you are the mad and bad one.
Press them on this. Read the evidence yourself. Arm yourself intellectually. Ask your daughter’s teacher about the literature. When they cite a study, see if they know the relevant p-value or adjusted R-squared.
But don’t get too academic. Apply everyday logic. Gender studies PhDs love to bamboozle regular folk with jargon. If they can’t explain themselves in ordinary terms, it means they can’t explain themselves. And if they reject your arguments for lack of peer-reviewed studies, they’re probably hiding something. Probe further. Do the work.
Straw man
Don’t let them straw man you either. They will try. Asking questions about the efficacy of gender policies at schools is not bigoted. Asserting contractual rights is not regressive. And being absolutely, totally, fabulously in favour of anyone living their life as they please is entirely consistent with demanding evidence from a school council on how many hundreds of thousands of rands they are spending on gender-neutral bathrooms.
Most important, know that the social pressure has no necessary link to reality. Only evidence and reason can achieve that. They called people names for dismissing peanut allergy mania. I’m sure moms who questioned self-esteem extremism were uninvited from parties. They weren’t right because they were heretics. They were right because they paused, did the work, and refused to bow to dangerous ideologues. You can too.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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