Self-esteem, Self-respect
Self-esteem, Self-respect
One of the projects that has taken up quite a bit of my time this week has been the development of a new Student Protection Policy for the College. It is a sad comment on society’s loss of innocence that we feel the need to provide regulatory frameworks to protect the safety of young people, and yet the newspapers and our own experiences show that we do not live in the ideal world to which we might aspire.
We know from a wide spectrum of diverse experiences spanning “Lord of the Flies” to the Holocaust that a breakdown in law and order leads to anarchy that disempowers the weak and vulnerable while empowering the dominant and the vocal. At their best, rules and policies provide protection for the less articulate, the less litigious and those on the more vulnerable side of power relationships. Observers of recent changes in US legislation might dispute this claim, but I think it is generally accurate.
Of course, dealing with these sorts of issues is not why I became a teacher. It was not for a love of administration that I chose a career in teaching - it was for a love of forming the lives of young people! Or, to express it more eloquently using the words of the early Jesuit educator, Juan de Bonifacio “The education of youth is the renewal of the world”.
I was thinking about this during the week as I was taking in the beautiful view from our home on campus that looks across Tolo Harbour, a view that always provides me with much-needed stillness and serenity (this week’s image, see above). And as I did so, I wondered whether some of the comments made by Hugh Mackay in the Sydney Morning Herald about three weeks ago illuminated or obscured the values underpinning the world in which young people are educated today . He wrote this:
“As part of the mad cult of perfectionism, I suspect we’ve also gone overboard with the notion of ‘self-esteem’. In our desire to make young people feel good about themselves, we may have neglected to point out that life isn’t always fair; that self-doubt is an authentic pathway to self-knowledge; that failure is a thing to be coped with; that constructive criticism can be valuable; that not everything we do is worthy of a gold star. Perhaps we need to concentrate more on the importance of self-respect rather than trying to pump up our children’s self-esteem. We need to encourage them to understand and accept who they really are (as opposed to what someone else might want them to be), to act in ways that are consistent with their values, and to accept their frailties and even their shortcomings as part of the proof that they are human.”
Mackay’s words are probably based on a flawed view of young people, or to put it more kindly, I think he has a view that is much more negative than mine when I think of the young people I work with. I am constantly amazed by the capabilities, the idealism, the energy, the creativity and the sheer ability of the students in my own College. And yet, I worry that these fine attributes may triumph in spite of, not because of, the emphasis society increasingly places on self-esteem over self-respect. Maybe we could be doing better as a society to shape the lives of young people. As I often remind myself, the good is the enemy of the excellent!
And mature self-respect, shared universally by everyone, would mean there was no need for things like Student Protection Policies and suchlike. In many ways, I am an idealist like my students, but I am also realistic enough to understand that we have a lot more work to do before society achieves the utopia of universal self-respect.
That is why colleges like mine exist!
Sunday, 24 September 2006