At least on the emotional level, contemporary American education sides with the obstacles. It begins by treating children as psychologically fragile beings who will fail to learn — and worse, fail to develop as "whole persons" — if not constantly praised. The self-esteem movement may have its merits, but preparing students for arduous intellectual ascents aren't among them. What the movement most commonly yields is a surfeit of college freshmen who "feel good" about themselves for no discernible reason and who grossly overrate their meager attainments.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=03hp5gr19z5sb0cdvhtsk5qgp3yhdttf

i can't say i'm persuaded by the article's overall message, but i agree that we need to be doing more to encourage intellectual development in our students.

"The United States is trying to combine an elitist, aristocratic notion of higher education with an egalitarian notion. On the one hand, every man has a right to a college education, but on the other, only those who have high test scores have a right to get into the schools where they can expect something more than custodial care. And even in these schools early specialization may well replace broad general culture with narrow technical competencies. There is a danger that our attempt to make higher education possible for everybody and at the same time to turn out a skilled technical elite will lead to a complex multitrack system which will do just about everything but produce educated, cultivated human beings."

Centro: Dunno, but I blame hippies.

oimoi: The hippies didn't do their job properly.

Huh, I thought they all became grade-school teachers.

Self-esteem, self-respect, or self-consequence?

i really can't comment here. i was taught by the jesuits and the xaverians. self-esteem was a sin and all of my teachers had the right to hit me if they so desired.

Catholics know what education consists of.

well, that method works for some people, but it definitely doesn't work for others. if you are good at following rules, staying within the lines, and willing to follow the letter of the law at all times you'll get a good education.

however, we had a suicide attempt rate that was just ridiculous compared to the rest of the city.

I was a lucky duck- my high school really strict, but at the same time allowed for quite a bit of self expression. Also, the math and science departments kicked some major educational ass. I took a few science courses that would fail you if you made below an 80%. you'd get either an A or B or F-

but i love the tendency to teach to the lowest common denominator. it turns kids like me into misanthropic/sociopathic troublemakers.

Read the profile of Lang Lang in last week's New Yorker. When, at the age of 10, Lang Lang failed to get into a prestigious conservatory, Lang Lang's father gave him a bottle of pills and told him to swallow them all and kill himself, rather than shame the family!

Now *that's* parenting! If more parents were that wise, we'd have a lot more great pianists, instead of kids who are good at nothing except video games and hanging out.

fuz: Quite deliberately I chose the one paragraph that I could agree wholeheartedly with. I don't agree with the National Association of Scholars, but there are important issues that need to be addressed here.

I have had no encounter with grade school education since my own, and that was lackluster at best, which is to be expected, since it was in a relatively small town in Texas. Things may have improved for the upper quarter of students with more honors classes, but perhaps they haven't.

little p: Sounds like you attended a good high school.

Then we need to start paying teachers enough so that top of the line students want to go into the profession.

This article is just this NAS guy's excuse to blame "diversity" as an ideal in US education (which he equates with self-esteem promotion) for the lack of American-born science grad students.
I think it's American business culture, pop culture and consumerism that get in the way rather than what's going on IN school. Everyone knows that kids who study science aren't "cool" in the US; the girls don't want to seem too smart, and the boys want to get laid. Everything about American youth culture discourages academic excellence. Teachers can't be blamed for not being able to overcome this problem; parents haven't succeeded either.
Students in school today see businessmen as examples of success, not scientists. The strivers among my students don't want to be scientists, they want to go open their own businesses or go work in finance. Our culture is full of examples of stupid, or at least ignorant people with tons of money and power - why bother learning anything?

@DZ: those are probably the same people who are writing articles about how GEN-X kids don't want to work and aren't team players and how the younger generation are a bunch of know nothing bastards. it's the same sky-is-falling "kids these days" that adults have been screaming about since socrates.