posted 28 March 2005 01:54 PM            

Rory Coker, Ph.D.

The word "pseudo" means fake. The surest way to spot a fake is to know as much as possible about the real thing -- in this case, about science itself. Knowing science does not mean simply knowing scientific facts (such as the distance from earth to sun, the age of the earth, the distinction between mammal and reptile, etc.) It means understanding the nature of science -- the criteria of evidence, the design of meaningful experiments, the weighing of possibilities, the testing of hypotheses, the establishment of theories, the many aspects of scientific methods that make it possible to draw reliable conclusions about the physical universe.

Because the media bombard us with nonsense, it is useful to consider the earmarks of pseudoscience. The presence of even one of these should arouse great suspicion. On the other hand, material displaying none of these flaws might still be pseudoscience, because its adherents invent new ways to fool themselves every day. Most of the examples in this article are related to my field of physics, but similar beliefs and behavior are associated with iridology, medical astrology, meridian therapy, reflexology, subluxation-based chiropractic, therapeutic touch, and other health-related pseudosciences.

Pseudoscience displays an indifference to facts.
Instead of bothering to consult reference works or investigating directly, its advocates simply spout bogus "facts" where needed. These fictions are often central to the pseudoscientist's argument and conclusions. Moreover, pseudoscientists rarely revise. The first edition of a pseudoscience book is almost always the last, even though the book remains in print for decades or even centuries. Even books with obvious mistakes, errors, and misprints on every page may be reprinted as is, over and over. Compare this to science textbooks that see a new edition every few years because of the rapid accumulation of new facts and insights.

Pseudoscience "research" is invariably sloppy.
Pseudoscientists clip newspaper reports, collect hearsay, cite other pseudoscience books, and pore over ancient religious or mythological works. They rarely or never make an independent investigation to check their sources.

Pseudoscience begins with a hypothesis -- usually one which is appealing emotionally,
and spectacularly implausible -- and then looks only for items which appear to support it.
Conflicting evidence is ignored. Generally speaking, the aim of pseudoscience is to rationalize strongly held beliefs, rather than to investigate or to test alternative possibilities. Pseudoscience specializes in jumping to "congenial conclusions," grinding ideological axes, appealing to preconceived ideas and to widespread misunderstandings.

Pseudoscience is indifferent to criteria of valid evidence.
The emphasis is not on meaningful, controlled, repeatable scientific experiments. Instead it is on unverifiable eyewitness testimony, stories and tall tales, hearsay, rumor, and dubious anecdotes. Genuine scientific literature is either ignored or misinterpreted.

Pseudoscience relies heavily on subjective validation.
Joe Blow puts jello on his head and his headache goes away. To pseudoscience, this means jello cures headaches. To science this means nothing, since no experiment was done. Many things were going on when Joe Blow's headache went away -- the moon was full, a bird flew overhead, the window was open, Joe had on his red shirt, etc. -- and his headache would have gone away eventually in any case, no matter what. A controlled experiment would put many people suffering from headaches in identical circumstances, except for the presence or absence of the remedy it is desired to test, and compare the results which would then have some chance of being meaningful. Many people think there must be something to astrology because a newspaper horoscope describes them perfectly. But close examination would reveal that the description is general enough to cover virtually everyone. This phenomenon, called subjective validation, is one of the foundations of popular support for pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience depends on arbitrary conventions of human
culture, rather than on unchanging regularities of nature.
For instance, the interpretations of astrology depend on the names of things, which are accidental and vary from culture to culture. If the ancients had given the name Mars to the planet we call Jupiter, and vice versa, astronomy could care less but astrology would be totally different, because it depends solely on the name and has nothing to do with the physical properties of the planet itself.

Pseudoscience always achieves a reduction to absurdity if pursued far enough.
Maybe dowsers can somehow sense the presence of water or minerals under a field, but almost all claim they can dowse equally well from a map! Maybe Uri Geller is "psychic," but are his powers really beamed to him on a radio link with a flying saucer from the planet Hoova, as he has claimed? Maybe plants are "psychic," but why does a bowl of mud respond in exactly the same way, in the same "experiment?"

Pseudoscience always avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test.
Pseudoscientists never carry out careful, methodical experiments themselves -- and they also generally ignore results of those carried out by scientists. Pseudoscientists also never follow up. If one pseudoscientist claims to have done an experiment (such as the "lost" biorhythm studies of Hermann Swoboda that are alleged basis of the modern pseudoscience of biorhythms), no other pseudoscientist ever tries to duplicate it or to check him, even when the original results are missing or questionable! Further, where a pseudoscientist claims to have done an experiment with a remarkable result, he himself never repeats it to check his results and procedures. This is in extreme contrast with science, where crucial experiments are repeated by scientists all over the world with ever-increasing precision.

Pseudoscience often contradicts itself, even in its own terms.
Such logical contradictions are simply ignored or rationalized away. Thus, we should not be surprised when Chapter 1
of a book on dowsing says that dowsers use newly cut twigs, because only "live" wood can channel and focus the "earth-radiation"
that makes dowsing possible, whereas Chapter 5 states that nearly all dowsers use metal or plastic rods.

Pseudoscience deliberately creates mystery where none
exists, by omitting crucial information and important details.
Anything can be made "mysterious" by omitting what is known about it or presenting completely imaginary details. The "Bermuda Triangle" books are classic examples of this tactic.

Pseudoscience does not progress.
There are fads, and a pseudoscientist may switch from one fad to another (from ghosts to ESP research, from flying saucers to psychic studies, from ESP research to looking for Bigfoot). But within a given topic, no progress is made. Little or no new information or uncovered. New theories are seldom proposed, and old concepts are rarely modified or discarded in light of new "discoveries," since pseudoscience rarely makes new "discoveries." The older the idea, the more respect it receives. No natural phenomena or processes previously unknown to science have ever been discovered by pseudoscientists. Indeed, pseudoscientists almost invariably deal with phenomena well known to scientists, but little known to the general public -- so that the public will swallow whatever the pseudoscientist wants to claim. Examples include firewalking and "Kirlian" photography.

Pseudoscience attempts to persuade with rhetoric, propaganda, and
misrepresentation rather than valid evidence (which presumably does not exist).
Pseudoscience books offer examples of almost every kind of fallacy of logic and reason known to scholars and have invented some new ones of their own. A favorite device is the non sequitur. Pseudoscientists also love the "Galileo Argument." This consists of the pseudoscientist comparing himself to Galileo, and saying that just as the pseudoscientist is believed to be wrong, so Galileo was thought wrong by his contemporaries therefore the pseudoscientist must be right too, just as Galileo was. Clearly the conclusion does not follow! Moreover, Galileo's ideas were tested, verified, and accepted promptly by his scientific colleagues. The rejection came from the established religion which favored the pseudoscience that Galileo's findings contradicted.

Pseudoscience argues from ignorance, an elementary fallacy.
Many pseudoscientists base their claims on incompleteness of information about nature, rather than on what is known at present. But no claim can possibly be supported by lack of information. The fact that people don't recognize what they see in the sky means only that they don't recognize what they saw. This fact is not evidence that flying saucers are from outer space. The statement "Science cannot explain" is common in pseudoscience literature. In many cases, science has no interest in the supposed phenomena because there is no evidence it exists; in other cases, the scientific explanation is well known and well established, but the pseudoscientist doesn't know this or deliberately ignores it to create mystery.

Pseudoscience argues from alleged exceptions, errors, anomalies, strange events,
and suspect claims -- rather than from well-established regularities of nature.
The experience of scientists over the past 400 years is that claims and reports that describe well-understood objects behaving in strange and incomprehensible ways tend to reduce upon investigation to deliberate frauds, honest mistakes, garbled accounts, misinterpretations, outright fabrications, and stupid blunders. It is not wise to accept such reports at face value, without checking them. Pseudoscientists always take such reports as literally true, without independent verification.

Pseudoscience appeals to false authority, to emotion,
sentiment, or distrust of established fact.
A high-school dropout is accepted as an expert on archaeology, though he has never made any study of it! A psychoanalyst is accepted as an expert on all of human history, not to mention physics, astronomy, and mythology, even though his claims are inconsistent with everything known in all four fields. A movie star swears it's true, so it must be. A physicist says a "psychic" couldn't possibly have fooled him with simple magic tricks, although the physicist knows nothing about magic and sleight of hand. Emotional appeals are common. ("If it makes you feel good, it must be true." "In your heart you know it's right.") Pseudoscientists are fond of imaginary conspiracies. ("There's plenty of evidence for flying saucers, but the government keeps it secret.") And they argue from irrelevancies: When confronted by inconvenient facts, they simply reply, "Scientists don't know everything!"

Pseudoscience makes extraordinary claims and advances fantastic
theories that contradict what is known about nature.
They not only provide no evidence that their claims are true. They also ignore all findings that contradict their conclusions. ("Flying saucers have to come from somewhere -- so the earth is hollow, and they come from inside." "This electric spark I'm making with this electrical apparatus is actually not a spark at all, but rather a supernatural manifestation of psycho-spiritual energy." "Every human is surrounded by an impalpable aura of electromagnetic energy, the auric egg of the ancient Hindu seers, which mirrors the human's every mood and condition.")

Pseudoscientists invent their own vocabulary in which many terms lack
precise or unambiguous definitions, and some have no definition at all.
Listeners are often forced to interpret the statements according to their own preconceptions. What, for for example, is "biocosmic energy?" Or a "psychotronic amplification system?" Pseudoscientists often attempt to imitate the jargon of scientific and technical fields by spouting gibberish that sounds scientific and technical. Quack "healers" would be lost without the term "energy," but their use of the term has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of energy used by physicists.

Pseudoscience appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific
methodology while simultaneously denying their validity.
Thus, a procedurally invalid experiment which seems to show that astrology works is advanced as "proof" that astrology is correct, while thousands of procedurally sound experiments that show it does not work are ignored. The fact that someone got away with simple magic tricks in one scientific lab is "proof" that he is a psychic superman, while the fact that he was caught cheating in several other labs is ignored.

Pseudoscience claims that the phenomena it studies are "jealous."
The phenomena appear only under certain vaguely specified but vital conditions (such as when no doubters or skeptics are present; when no experts are present; when nobody is watching; when the "vibes" are right; or only once in human history.) Science holds that genuine phenomena must be capable of study by anyone with the proper equipment and that all procedurally valid studies must give consistent results. No genuine phenomenon is "jealous" in this way. There is no way to construct a TV set or a radio that will function only when no skeptics are present! A man who claims to be a concert-class violinist, but does not appear to have ever owned a violin and who refuses to play when anyone is around who might hear him, is most likely lying about his ability to play the violin.

Pseudoscientific "explanations" tend to be by scenario.
That is, we are told a story, but nothing else; we have no description of any possible physical process. For instance, former psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) claimed that another planet passing near the earth caused the earth's spin axis to flip upside down. This is all he said. He gave no mechanisms. But the mechanism is all-important, because the laws of physics rule out the process as impossible. That is, the approach of another planet cannot cause a planet's spin axis to flip. If Velikovsky had discovered some way that a planet could flip another's spin axis, he would presumably have described the mechanism by which it can happen. The bald statement itself, without the underlying mechanism, conveys no information at all. Velikovsky said that Venus was once a comet, and this comet was spewed out of a volcano on Jupiter. Since planets do not resemble comets (which are rock/ice snowball-like debris with connection whatsoever to volcanoes) and since Jupiter is not known to have volcanoes anyway (or even a solid surface!), no actual physical process could underlie Velikovsky's assertions. He gave us words, related to one another within a sentence, but the relationships were alien to the universe we actually live in, and he gave no explanation for how these could exist. He provided stories, not genuine theories.

Pseudoscientists often appeal to the ancient human habit of magical thinking.
Magic, sorcery, witchcraft -- these are based on spurious similarity, false analogy, false cause-and-effect connections, etc. That is, inexplicable influences and connections between things are assumed from the beginning -- not found by investigation. (If you step on a crack in the sidewalk without saying a magic word, your mother will crack a bone in her body; eating heart-shaped leaves is good for heart ailments; shining red light on the body increases blood production; rams are aggressive so someone born in the sign of the ram is aggressive; fish are "brain food" because the meat of the fish resembles brain tissue, etc.)

Pseudoscience relies heavily on anachronistic thinking.
The older the idea, the more attractive it is to pseudoscience -- it's the wisdom of the ancients! -- especially if the idea is transparently wrong and has long been discarded by science. Many journalists have trouble in comprehending this point. A typical reporter writing about astrology may think a thorough job can be done by interviewing six astrologers and one astronomer. The astronomer says it's all bunk; the six astrologers say it's great stuff and really works and for $50 they'll be glad to cast anyone's horoscope. (No doubt!) To many reporters, and apparently to many editors and their readers, this would confirm astrology six to one!

This table contrasts some of the characteristics of science and pseudoscience

Science Pseudoscience
Their findings are expressed primarily through scientific journals that are peer-reviewed and maintain rigorous standards for honesty and accuracy. The literature is aimed at the general public. There is no review, no standards, no pre-publication verification, no demand for accuracy and precision.
Reproducible results are demanded; experiments must be precisely described so that they can be duplicated exactly or improved upon. Results cannot be reproduced or verified. Studies, if any, are always so vaguely described that one can't figure out what was done or how it was done.
Failures are searched for and studied closely, because incorrect theories can often make correct predictions by accident, but no correct theory will make incorrect predictions. Failures are ignored, excused, hidden, lied about, discounted, explained away, rationalized, forgotten, avoided at all costs.
As time goes on, more and more is learned about the physical processes under study. No physical phenomena or processes are ever found or studied. No progress is made; nothing concrete is learned.
Convinces by appeal to the evidence, by arguments based upon logical and/or mathematical reasoning, by making the best case the data permit. When new evidence contradicts old ideas, they are abandoned. Convinces by appeal to faith and belief. Pseudoscience has a strong quasi-religious element: it tries to convert, not to convince. You are to believe in spite of the facts, not because of them. The original idea is never abandoned, whatever the evidence.
Does not advocate or market unproven practices or products. Generally earns some or all of his living by selling questionable products (such as books, courses, and dietary supplements) and/or pseudoscientific services (such as horoscopes, character readings, spirit messages, and predictions).

This table could be greatly expanded, because science and pseudoscience are precisely opposed ways of viewing nature. Science relies on -- and insists on -- self-questioning, testing and analytical thinking that make it hard to fool yourself or to avoid facing facts. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, preserves the ancient, natural, irrational, unobjective modes of thought that are hundreds of thousands of years older than science -- thought processes that have given rise to superstitions and other fanciful and mistaken ideas about man and nature -- from voodoo to racism; from the flat earth to the house-shaped universe with God in the attic, Satan in the cellar and man on the ground floor; from doing rain dances to torturing and brutalizing the mentally ill to drive out the demons that possess them. Pseudoscience encourages people to believe anything they want. It supplies specious "arguments" for fooling yourself into thinking that any and all beliefs are equally valid. Science begins by saying, let's forget about what we believe to be so, and try by investigation to find out what actually is so. These roads don't cross; they lead in completely opposite directions.

Some confusion on this point is caused by what we might call "crossover." "Science" is not an honorary badge you wear, it's an activity you do. Whenever you cease that activity, you cease being a scientist. A distressing amount of pseudoscience is generated by scientists who are well trained in one field but plunge into another field of which they are ignorant. A physicist who claims to have found a new principle of biology -- or a biologist who claims to have found a new principle of physics -- is almost invariably doing pseudoscience. And so are those who forge data, or suppresses data that clash with their preconceptions, or refuse to let others see their data for independent evaluation. Science is like a high peak of intellectual integrity, fairness, and rationality. The peak is slippery and smooth. It requires a tremendous effort to remain near it. Slacking of effort carries one away and into pseudoscience. Some pseudoscience is generated by individuals with a small amount of specialized scientific or technical training who are not professional scientists and do not comprehend the nature of the scientific enterprise -- yet think of themselves as "scientists."

One might wonder if there are not examples of "crossovers" in the other direction; that is people who have been thought by scientists to be doing pseudoscience, who eventually were accepted as doing valid science, and whose ideas were ultimately accepted by scientists. From what we have just outlined, one would expect this to happen extremely rarely, if ever. In fact, neither I nor any informed colleague I have ever asked about this, knows of any single case in which this has happened during the hundreds of years the full scientific method has been known to and used by scientists. There are many cases in which a scientist has been thought wrong by colleagues but later -- when new information comes in -- is shown to be correct. Like anyone else, scientists can get hunches that something is possible without having enough evidence to convince their associates that they are correct. Such people do not become pseudoscientists, unless they continue to maintain that their ideas are correct when contradictory evidence piles up. Being wrong or mistaken is unavoidable; we are all human, and we all commit errors and blunders. True scientists, however, are alert to the possibility of blunder and are quick to correct mistakes. Pseudoscientists do not. In fact, a short definition of pseudoscience is "a method for excusing, defending, and preserving errors."

Pseudoscience often strikes educated, rational people as too nonsensical and preposterous to be dangerous and as a source of amusement rather than fear. Unfortunately, this is not a wise attitude. Pseudoscience can be extremely dangerous.

posted 28 March 2005 02:16 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
Pseudoscientists invent their own vocabulary in which many terms lack
precise or unambiguous definitions, and some have no definition at all.

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This is halarious! I'm ROTFL because this is exactly what evil Euro and Abaza do..... Let the games begin..

posted 28 March 2005 02:22 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
If you agree with the AAA rasol why are you always talking about race. That is clearly the subject that dominates every waking thought you have. You can't have it both ways?

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Horemheb you see how this truly defines you, abaza, and evil euro's manner of arguing. The racialization of AE was done by people of European descent and is still perpetuated with subtle lying by ommision and visually.

posted 28 March 2005 02:41 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
There is no such thing as a Eurocentric Keins. That is a little fantasy cooked up in the minds of people who are preoccupied by their race, like yourself. Keins...you are black, you were born black and you will die black. Why spend all of the years you have PREOCCUPIED by blackness. Join the world, go out and lead a full life and leave the bitterness to the racists like rasol. IBM and GE don't care if you are green. If you can make them money you have a place in the world. This need globalism CREATED by western society and led by the US and UK has a place for everyone , regardless of race.

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posted 28 March 2005 03:09 PM            

quote:

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BigMix....I read a critique of the book on the net a few minutes ago.

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posted 28 March 2005 03:26 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
There is no such thing as a Eurocentric Keins. That is a little fantasy cooked up in the minds of people who are preoccupied by their race, like yourself. Keins...you are black, you were born black and you will die black. Why spend all of the years you have PREOCCUPIED by blackness. Join the world, go out and lead a full life and leave the bitterness to the racists like rasol. IBM and GE don't care if you are green. If you can make them money you have a place in the world. This need globalism CREATED by western society and led by the US and UK has a place for everyone , regardless of race.

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First of all my life is more fulfilled emotionally, financially and sexually than yours can ever be! It is sad that you have your self-esteem built on attaining money and material possessions. You seem to have no value for truth, honestly, character and humanity or nature. You talk of this capatilistic society that does not care about race once you can bring them money but the people make this system work.

The ones who have preoccuppied about race is on general white americans. Blacks and black american are just more likely and willing to honestly talk about these issues out loud in hopes of solving problems. It is mostly on the part of white americans like yourself whom pretend that all is fair when you know in your hearts the ill feelings, prejudices and biases about black people and non white people. You provide proof to the about statement, you are obviously preoccuppied and hateful by the language you use on this board. You do this while pretending to have morals, and pretending to care for people and humailty as a whole. Ironically I learned this with the help of some very good white friends who know how some of their families and white borthers and sisters think, act and what they say only when they are in the trusting company of other likewise whites.

You are right, I was born black and will die black and I love that and would not have it any other way. Being born black is a natural blessing, however I will not get into the scientific reason (I now understand) that make me appreciate this fact.

All of this has no direct connection to AE besides showing the eurocentric pleade to cultural biases to maintain a faux projection and preception of Ancient Egypt to sustain the current structure of power and wealth in this world. I will not play along with you emotional distractions horemheb.

posted 28 March 2005 03:27 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
[B] The problem I see for Mr. Mills position is that it is in conflict with the goals of global capitalism.

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One cannot deny the racial opinions that have intertwined itself in Western thought, and to say that one can simply divorce themselves from racial opinions for the sake of profits is ridiculous, since the profiting in a large part is dependent upon the rules of the game of which race is important.

Capitalism as a direct creation of the Enlightenment period comes necessarily with the racial baggage of the Enlightenment period of which this baggage helped to construct society for its economic ends according to its own theorizing.

posted 28 March 2005 03:29 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
no use in you replying rasol...you would not know social contract theory from a cook book....go away.

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Sorry Professor....my thread.

posted 28 March 2005 03:31 PM            

The Self-Esteem Fraud:
Why Feel-Good Education Does Not Lead to Academic Success.
By Nina H. Shokraii.

Executive Summary

Which comes first, achievement or self-esteem? This question is at the heart of an important educational controversy. Traditionally, public schools have thought that students’ satisfaction will follow on the heels of their academic success. In other words, children who perform well in class will consequently feel good about themselves. But more recent educational theories have reversed this logic. They say that students must secure high self-esteem before they can hope to achieve. In other words, they must feel good about themselves before they can perform well in class.

For all of its current popularity, however, self-esteem theory threatens to deny children the tools they will need in order to experience true success in school and as adults. Compelling research from around the world lends empirical proof to the traditional claim that achievement precedes self-esteem. There is, in fact, almost no correlation between low self-esteem and any number of social pathologies, including poor school performance, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy.

Black children are common targets of self-esteem theory, which in their case often goes by the name of Afrocentrism. Yet they are also some of the most vulnerable, since many of them desperately require the same basic academic skills that self-esteem theory subordinates to a shallow, feel-good classroom experience. One study has even shown that inflated self-esteem among adolescent black males can encourage violent behavior.

Schools must abandon their mindless pursuit of empty self-esteem and return to the fundamental task of helping students do their best. Traditional academic preparation best teaches children how to achieve old-fashioned academic success.

Introduction

Americans have lost confidence in their public schools. A Washington Post survey recently asked people what worries them about the future. They were given dozens of choices, from sky-high crime rates to increasing drug usage to old-fashioned economic anxiety. Of all these problems, however, Americans identified the deterioration of public schools as the country’s most pressing problem. "The American educational system will get worse instead of better" feared 62 percent of them.1

This is not exactly a new concern. Frustrated by everything from a long-term decline in test scores to the recent rise in juvenile violence, many Americans are left scratching their heads in bewilderment. What has gone wrong? What can reverse these trends? Desperate for anything that might boost the academic achievement of their charges, many schools have turned to self-esteem theory, which says that teaching children to feel good about themselves will help them perform better as students. This pedagogical approach has begun to dislodge the more traditional emphasis on subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic.2

This is fundamentally wrongheaded. There is little reason to believe self-esteem leads to academic achievement, or even that self-esteem is necessary for academic success. It is therefore crucial to delegitimize the education establishment’s mindless glorification of self-esteem. As Richard Weissbourd has written, schools gripped by self-esteem theory "are, in essence, producing a generation of poorly educated adults who will lack the habits of hard work and perseverance that have historically been necessary to achieving true success."3

What Is Self-Esteem?

There is no shortage of ways to define self-esteem. Perhaps the simplest one is found in Webster’s Dictionary, which says that self-esteem is "satisfaction with oneself."4 The Basic Behavioral Science Task Force of the National Advisory Mental Health Council offers a fuller explanation: "Self-esteem begins to develop early in life and has been studied in children as young as seven years of age. As children learn to describe aspects of themselves, such as their physical attributes, abilities, and preferences, they also begin to evaluate them. Researchers conclude that, contrary to intuition, individuals have not one but several views of their selves, encompassing many domains of life, such as scholastic ability, physical appearance and romantic appeal, job competence, and adequacy as a provider."5

Psychologists generally split self-esteem into two types: earned self-esteem and global self-esteem. The concepts of each differ in critical ways:

Earned self-esteem. This is the self-esteem that people earn through their own accomplishments –- satisfaction from having scored well on an exam, for example. The psychologist Barbara Lerner says that earned self-esteem "is based on success in meeting the tests of reality -- measuring up to standards at home and in school."6 Earned self-esteem possesses all of the positive character traits that ought to be encouraged and applauded, because it is ultimately based on work habits.

Global self-esteem. This refers to a general sense of pride in oneself. It is not grounded in a particular skill or achievement. This means that an underachieving student can still bask in the warmth of global self-esteem, even if the door to earned self-esteem is shut. Advocates say that this feeling of self-worth will inspire academic success. The reality is different. At best, global self-esteem is meaningless. At worst, it is harmful. William Damon, an educational psychologist at Brown University, warns that heightened global self-esteem can lead children to have "an exaggerated, though empty and ultimately fragile sense of their own powers ... [or] a distrust of adult communications and self-doubt."7
The fundamental difference between earned self-esteem and global self-esteem rests on their concepts of academic achievement. The idea of earned self-esteem says that achievement comes first and that self-esteem follows. Global self-esteem theory –- which is more popular in schools -- says that self-esteem leads the way and achievement trails behind. Earned self-esteem, of course, can take care of itself. It will develop almost naturally when children have accomplished something worthwhile. Global self-esteem, however, is artificial. It requires active intervention on the part of teachers, parents, and other authority figures. It is more than mere encouragement –- something all children need. Instead, it involves tricking kids into thinking that anything and everything they do is praiseworthy.

Self-Esteem and Academic Success

In 1986, a group of California state legislators convinced themselves that low self-esteem was the root cause behind a variety of social and economic problems such as drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and poor school performance. Before taking this line of thinking too far, however, they decided they needed some research to back up their claims. So they established the awkwardly-titled California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. The Task Force published its findings in a book called The Social Importance of Self-Esteem. The editors might as well have called their book The Social Unimportance of Self-Esteem, however, because they found practically no connection between self-esteem and any of the behaviors they studied. As Neil Smelser noted in his introduction, "One of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume ... is how low the associations between self-esteem and its consequences are in research to date."8 Over the years, other reviewers have offered similar readings of the available research, pointing to results that are unimpressive or characterized by "massive inconsistencies and contradictions."9 Most remarkable about the California Task Force, it was not a disinterested group of scholars. They wanted to find a link. But when their research failed to turn one up, they had the honesty to admit it.

Student Performance in Asia

Scholars focusing on the connection between high global self-esteem and academic success have run into similar barriers.10 When psychologists Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler tested the academic skills of elementary school students in Japan, Taiwan, China, and the United States, the Asian students easily outperformed their American counterparts. That came as no surprise. But when the same students were asked how they felt about their subject skills, the Americans exhibited a significantly higher self-evaluation of their academic prowess. In other words, they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem. As Stevenson and Stigler point out, Asian schools teach their students to indulge in self-congratulation only after they have paid their dues, through years of learning and hard work. While educators in most countries frown upon pride -- one manifestation of a high self-esteem -- American teachers actually encourage it as a positive personality trait.11

Part of the problem, Stevenson and Stigler found, lies in American teachers’ priorities in the classroom. They focus much more on sensitivity to the students’ needs, whereas Asians concentrate on their ability to explain things clearly. Indeed, roughly half of the Asian teachers surveyed said that clarity is one of the most important attributes required to be a good teacher. Only 10 percent of them said that sensitivity is equally important. Given the same set of choices, American teachers reversed priorities. Moreover, American teachers avoid exposing their students’ poor performance, fearing damage to their self-esteem. Japanese and Chinese teachers, on the other hand, regard mistakes as an index of what remains to be learned through persistence and increased effort. In other words, American schools worry more about how students view themselves than about their actual academic performance.

Australian researchers B.C. Hansford and J.A. Hattie scoured academic literature on the link between global self-esteem and academic achievement. And although they found a slim correlation, they also discovered that the better the research, the lower and less significant the connection. They recommended replacing efforts to boost global self-esteem with efforts to boost academic or subject-specific self-esteem -- which can only occur after students achieve academic success.12

Other studies show that programs created to promote self-esteem among elementary school students actually produce less of it than those designed to improve academic performance. The best research in this area evaluated a federal Head Start program to help children in grades 1-3, called Project Follow-Through. The researchers charged different schools to implement the project. To judge the effectiveness of self-esteem in underwriting academic success, they selected schools with differing philosophies of education. The models were then categorized into three major types: (1) holistically-oriented classrooms prone to promote self-esteem, (2) behaviorally-oriented models emphasizing traditional basic instruction, and (3) combination models that joined the two previous models. Researchers looked at 9,000 students on a variety of measures, from basic skills to cognitive and affective skills. The results were astounding. Students taught using the behavioral model received the highest scores not only in academics but also on self-esteem. The researchers could therefore safely conclude that programs designed to provide young children with the tools for academic success tend to be more successful as the children improve in both academic performance and self-esteem.13

This rule is not limited to young children. Thomas Moeller, a psychology professor at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, examined students in grades 6 and higher. In every instance, he concluded, "academic achievement is more closely related to academic self-concept than to global self-concept."14

Other research found that although academic achievement in one grade level predicts academic self-esteem in the next grade, neither academic achievement nor academic self-esteem have any identifiable effect on global self-esteem.15 Still other research finds that grades in a given discipline affect academic self-esteem in that particular discipline only. General academic self-concept finds its roots in a school’s climate, teachers’ ratings, and students’ commitment to work.16

Adolescents’ academic performance seems not even to be a factor affecting global self-esteem. Instead, they respond to social activities.17 Beyond high school, high school performance, academic ability, and socioeconomic status affect educational attainment more than global self-esteem.18

Self-Esteem and Black Children

Because self-esteem theory advertises itself as a quick fix to poor academic achievement, it would make sense that the neediest students are also the most vulnerable to its deceptive message. Indeed, black students enrolled in Afrocentric educational programs receive a full-course diet in self-esteem enhancement, all of it positioned on the shaky theoretical ground that injecting racial pride into black children will help them overcome obstacles to academic success.19 But again, the value of self-esteem for black children is highly questionable, even if it does not come packaged in Afrocentrism.

Self-esteem theory made its first dramatic impact upon American schools in 1954, when the Supreme Court accepted that school segregation damaged the self-esteem of African-American children in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Low self-esteem, the Court said, "affects the motivation of a child to learn, and has a tendency to retard children’s educational and mental development." According to Barbara Lerner, this proposition makes three questionable assumptions about blacks: (1) Low self-esteem is the major cause of low academic achievement; (2) Blacks have a lower self-esteem than whites; and (3) Changing white attitudes toward blacks will raise black self-esteem. Taken together, these faulty notions provide the reasoning behind the current repudiation of high standards and expectations in our public schools.20

In reality, black children at the same grade level and in the same school system as white children display a higher sense of self-esteem. African Americans usually report "slightly higher levels of agreement with statements about taking a positive attitude toward oneself, judging oneself to be a person ‘of worth,’ and being generally satisfied with oneself."21

Studies also show that, like whites, enhancement of global self-concept is not a potent intervention for academic improvement for African-American adolescents.22 Stanley Rothman and his colleagues at Smith College’s Center for the Study of Social and Political Change found that while the self-esteem levels of blacks are now at least as high as those of whites, the average academic attainment among African-American students is still below that of whites. They conclude that the evidence "appears to show quite conclusively that the low self-esteem hypothesis is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation of African-American achievement levels."23

Crime, Violence, and Self-Esteem

Those who think low self-esteem is the cause of high crime rates among blacks are also wrong. According to a recent study by psychologists Roy Baumeister, Joseph Boden, and Laura Smart, "first, [this notion] does not fit the transient shifts in the crime rate among African Americans, which is now reaching its highest levels as slavery recedes farther and farther into the background. Second, self-esteem levels among African Americans are now equal to, or higher than, the self-esteem levels of whites. Third, it is far from certain that slaves had a low self-esteem."24 A study by Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major of the State University of New York at Buffalo, similarly refuted the psychological theories that claim members of stigmatized groups (blacks, for example) should possess low global self-esteem. They argued that stigmatized individuals are not simply "passive victims but are frequently able to actively protect their self-esteem from prejudice and discrimination."25

Ironically, adolescent African-American males living in impoverished neighborhoods are more likely to turn violent if schools bombard them with unearned praise. Baumeister, Boden, and Smart found that when high self-esteem is challenged by others’ negative views, egotism is threatened. People will react in one of two ways. They either lower their self-appraisal and withdraw, or they maintain their self-appraisal and manifest negative emotions toward the source of the ego threat. This response can easily become violent in individuals who place high emphasis on their self-appraisal.26

Vulnerable Children

Every day in the name of self-esteem, however, schools cheat low-income children (many of whom are black) into settling for inflated egos instead of increased knowledge. Such efforts aimed at guaranteeing minorities heightened self-esteem, coupled with lawsuits challenging minimum competency exams and proficiency tests, erroneously assume that these children’s self-esteem cannot possibly get proper nourishment in the poor households in which they are reared. Social workers and teachers create special courses and excuses for these children on a regular basis.27

In his book The Vulnerable Child, Weissbourd vehemently attacks such efforts, asserting that "although poor children are more likely to suffer an array of ... problems, the great majority of poor children are prepared to learn, at least when they begin school. Developmental delays and serious learning difficulties among children ages three to five, are higher among poor than among middle- and upper-income children ... But over 75 percent of poor children ages 6-11 have never experienced significant developmental delays, or emotional troubles, or a learning disability in childhood." Weissbourd highly discourages enrolling disadvantaged minority kids in remedial courses or special education classes, because it will only make it more difficult for them to move into the mainstream.28

From lower standards to a reduced emphasis on tests, minorities are constantly being told that their egos are somehow more fragile and thus are somehow different from the rest of America, even though they have the most to gain from traditional ways of teaching.29 In fact, blacks can flourish in this type of environment, as the experiences of schools such as Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), Xavier Prep (New Orleans), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), and Dunbar (Washington) have shown.30 African Americans excel in these schools because they are expected to strive high and achieve. Instead of offering a broad array of extracurricular classes or dumbing down their curriculum to increase their African-American pupils’ "self-esteem," they offer a strict diet of math and reading and expect students to get the job done. As Sister Helen Struder, principal of the mostly-black Holy Angels school in Chicago, says, "After all, it’s by success that you build self esteem."31

Conclusion

After years of failed experimentation, it is time to stop touting the importance of self-esteem and start providing students with the elements real self-esteem is made of. As this Policy Brief shows, building self-esteem is not only a smokescreen vis-ŕ-vis academic success, it can also lead to considerable harm. After all, as Weissbourd points out "to develop effective coping strategies, children, in fact, need to learn to manage a certain amount of disappointment and conflict."32

As schools turn against self-esteem theory, they must go back to the basics of teaching, reinstalling high standards and expectations, and holding children accountable for their actions. But these efforts ought not replace paying attention to children’s needs and concerns as individuals. Many educators agree on three general strategies:

Build the relationship between a teacher or parent and a child on respect for the child’s inborn strengths,

Help the child set goals and then link sustained effort with success, and

posted 28 March 2005 03:48 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by ABAZA:
CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

[b]The Self-Esteem Fraud:
Why Feel-Good Education Does Not Lead to Academic Success.
By Nina H. Shokraii.

Executive Summary

Which comes first, achievement or self-esteem? This question is at the heart of an important educational controversy. Traditionally, public schools have thought that students’ satisfaction will follow on the heels of their academic success. In other words, children who perform well in class will consequently feel good about themselves. But more recent educational theories have reversed this logic. They say that students must secure high self-esteem before they can hope to achieve. In other words, they must feel good about themselves before they can perform well in class.

For all of its current popularity, however, self-esteem theory threatens to deny children the tools they will need in order to experience true success in school and as adults. Compelling research from around the world lends empirical proof to the traditional claim that achievement precedes self-esteem. There is, in fact, almost no correlation between low self-esteem and any number of social pathologies, including poor school performance, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy.

Black children are common targets of self-esteem theory, which in their case often goes by the name of Afrocentrism. Yet they are also some of the most vulnerable, since many of them desperately require the same basic academic skills that self-esteem theory subordinates to a shallow, feel-good classroom experience. One study has even shown that inflated self-esteem among adolescent black males can encourage violent behavior.

Schools must abandon their mindless pursuit of empty self-esteem and return to the fundamental task of helping students do their best. Traditional academic preparation best teaches children how to achieve old-fashioned academic success.

Introduction

Americans have lost confidence in their public schools. A Washington Post survey recently asked people what worries them about the future. They were given dozens of choices, from sky-high crime rates to increasing drug usage to old-fashioned economic anxiety. Of all these problems, however, Americans identified the deterioration of public schools as the country’s most pressing problem. "The American educational system will get worse instead of better" feared 62 percent of them.1

This is not exactly a new concern. Frustrated by everything from a long-term decline in test scores to the recent rise in juvenile violence, many Americans are left scratching their heads in bewilderment. What has gone wrong? What can reverse these trends? Desperate for anything that might boost the academic achievement of their charges, many schools have turned to self-esteem theory, which says that teaching children to feel good about themselves will help them perform better as students. This pedagogical approach has begun to dislodge the more traditional emphasis on subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic.2

This is fundamentally wrongheaded. There is little reason to believe self-esteem leads to academic achievement, or even that self-esteem is necessary for academic success. It is therefore crucial to delegitimize the education establishment’s mindless glorification of self-esteem. As Richard Weissbourd has written, schools gripped by self-esteem theory "are, in essence, producing a generation of poorly educated adults who will lack the habits of hard work and perseverance that have historically been necessary to achieving true success."3

What Is Self-Esteem?

There is no shortage of ways to define self-esteem. Perhaps the simplest one is found in Webster’s Dictionary, which says that self-esteem is "satisfaction with oneself."4 The Basic Behavioral Science Task Force of the National Advisory Mental Health Council offers a fuller explanation: "Self-esteem begins to develop early in life and has been studied in children as young as seven years of age. As children learn to describe aspects of themselves, such as their physical attributes, abilities, and preferences, they also begin to evaluate them. Researchers conclude that, contrary to intuition, individuals have not one but several views of their selves, encompassing many domains of life, such as scholastic ability, physical appearance and romantic appeal, job competence, and adequacy as a provider."5

Psychologists generally split self-esteem into two types: earned self-esteem and global self-esteem. The concepts of each differ in critical ways:

Earned self-esteem. This is the self-esteem that people earn through their own accomplishments –- satisfaction from having scored well on an exam, for example. The psychologist Barbara Lerner says that earned self-esteem "is based on success in meeting the tests of reality -- measuring up to standards at home and in school."6 Earned self-esteem possesses all of the positive character traits that ought to be encouraged and applauded, because it is ultimately based on work habits.

Global self-esteem. This refers to a general sense of pride in oneself. It is not grounded in a particular skill or achievement. This means that an underachieving student can still bask in the warmth of global self-esteem, even if the door to earned self-esteem is shut. Advocates say that this feeling of self-worth will inspire academic success. The reality is different. At best, global self-esteem is meaningless. At worst, it is harmful. William Damon, an educational psychologist at Brown University, warns that heightened global self-esteem can lead children to have "an exaggerated, though empty and ultimately fragile sense of their own powers ... [or] a distrust of adult communications and self-doubt."7
The fundamental difference between earned self-esteem and global self-esteem rests on their concepts of academic achievement. The idea of earned self-esteem says that achievement comes first and that self-esteem follows. Global self-esteem theory –- which is more popular in schools -- says that self-esteem leads the way and achievement trails behind. Earned self-esteem, of course, can take care of itself. It will develop almost naturally when children have accomplished something worthwhile. Global self-esteem, however, is artificial. It requires active intervention on the part of teachers, parents, and other authority figures. It is more than mere encouragement –- something all children need. Instead, it involves tricking kids into thinking that anything and everything they do is praiseworthy.

Self-Esteem and Academic Success

In 1986, a group of California state legislators convinced themselves that low self-esteem was the root cause behind a variety of social and economic problems such as drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and poor school performance. Before taking this line of thinking too far, however, they decided they needed some research to back up their claims. So they established the awkwardly-titled California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. The Task Force published its findings in a book called The Social Importance of Self-Esteem. The editors might as well have called their book The Social Unimportance of Self-Esteem, however, because they found practically no connection between self-esteem and any of the behaviors they studied. As Neil Smelser noted in his introduction, "One of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume ... is how low the associations between self-esteem and its consequences are in research to date."8 Over the years, other reviewers have offered similar readings of the available research, pointing to results that are unimpressive or characterized by "massive inconsistencies and contradictions."9 Most remarkable about the California Task Force, it was not a disinterested group of scholars. They wanted to find a link. But when their research failed to turn one up, they had the honesty to admit it.

Student Performance in Asia

Scholars focusing on the connection between high global self-esteem and academic success have run into similar barriers.10 When psychologists Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler tested the academic skills of elementary school students in Japan, Taiwan, China, and the United States, the Asian students easily outperformed their American counterparts. That came as no surprise. But when the same students were asked how they felt about their subject skills, the Americans exhibited a significantly higher self-evaluation of their academic prowess. In other words, they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem. As Stevenson and Stigler point out, Asian schools teach their students to indulge in self-congratulation only after they have paid their dues, through years of learning and hard work. While educators in most countries frown upon pride -- one manifestation of a high self-esteem -- American teachers actually encourage it as a positive personality trait.11

Part of the problem, Stevenson and Stigler found, lies in American teachers’ priorities in the classroom. They focus much more on sensitivity to the students’ needs, whereas Asians concentrate on their ability to explain things clearly. Indeed, roughly half of the Asian teachers surveyed said that clarity is one of the most important attributes required to be a good teacher. Only 10 percent of them said that sensitivity is equally important. Given the same set of choices, American teachers reversed priorities. Moreover, American teachers avoid exposing their students’ poor performance, fearing damage to their self-esteem. Japanese and Chinese teachers, on the other hand, regard mistakes as an index of what remains to be learned through persistence and increased effort. In other words, American schools worry more about how students view themselves than about their actual academic performance.

Australian researchers B.C. Hansford and J.A. Hattie scoured academic literature on the link between global self-esteem and academic achievement. And although they found a slim correlation, they also discovered that the better the research, the lower and less significant the connection. They recommended replacing efforts to boost global self-esteem with efforts to boost academic or subject-specific self-esteem -- which can only occur after students achieve academic success.12

Other studies show that programs created to promote self-esteem among elementary school students actually produce less of it than those designed to improve academic performance. The best research in this area evaluated a federal Head Start program to help children in grades 1-3, called Project Follow-Through. The researchers charged different schools to implement the project. To judge the effectiveness of self-esteem in underwriting academic success, they selected schools with differing philosophies of education. The models were then categorized into three major types: (1) holistically-oriented classrooms prone to promote self-esteem, (2) behaviorally-oriented models emphasizing traditional basic instruction, and (3) combination models that joined the two previous models. Researchers looked at 9,000 students on a variety of measures, from basic skills to cognitive and affective skills. The results were astounding. Students taught using the behavioral model received the highest scores not only in academics but also on self-esteem. The researchers could therefore safely conclude that programs designed to provide young children with the tools for academic success tend to be more successful as the children improve in both academic performance and self-esteem.13

This rule is not limited to young children. Thomas Moeller, a psychology professor at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, examined students in grades 6 and higher. In every instance, he concluded, "academic achievement is more closely related to academic self-concept than to global self-concept."14

Other research found that although academic achievement in one grade level predicts academic self-esteem in the next grade, neither academic achievement nor academic self-esteem have any identifiable effect on global self-esteem.15 Still other research finds that grades in a given discipline affect academic self-esteem in that particular discipline only. General academic self-concept finds its roots in a school’s climate, teachers’ ratings, and students’ commitment to work.16

Adolescents’ academic performance seems not even to be a factor affecting global self-esteem. Instead, they respond to social activities.17 Beyond high school, high school performance, academic ability, and socioeconomic status affect educational attainment more than global self-esteem.18

Self-Esteem and Black Children

Because self-esteem theory advertises itself as a quick fix to poor academic achievement, it would make sense that the neediest students are also the most vulnerable to its deceptive message. Indeed, black students enrolled in Afrocentric educational programs receive a full-course diet in self-esteem enhancement, all of it positioned on the shaky theoretical ground that injecting racial pride into black children will help them overcome obstacles to academic success.19 But again, the value of self-esteem for black children is highly questionable, even if it does not come packaged in Afrocentrism.

Self-esteem theory made its first dramatic impact upon American schools in 1954, when the Supreme Court accepted that school segregation damaged the self-esteem of African-American children in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Low self-esteem, the Court said, "affects the motivation of a child to learn, and has a tendency to retard children’s educational and mental development." According to Barbara Lerner, this proposition makes three questionable assumptions about blacks: (1) Low self-esteem is the major cause of low academic achievement; (2) Blacks have a lower self-esteem than whites; and (3) Changing white attitudes toward blacks will raise black self-esteem. Taken together, these faulty notions provide the reasoning behind the current repudiation of high standards and expectations in our public schools.20

In reality, black children at the same grade level and in the same school system as white children display a higher sense of self-esteem. African Americans usually report "slightly higher levels of agreement with statements about taking a positive attitude toward oneself, judging oneself to be a person ‘of worth,’ and being generally satisfied with oneself."21

Studies also show that, like whites, enhancement of global self-concept is not a potent intervention for academic improvement for African-American adolescents.22 Stanley Rothman and his colleagues at Smith College’s Center for the Study of Social and Political Change found that while the self-esteem levels of blacks are now at least as high as those of whites, the average academic attainment among African-American students is still below that of whites. They conclude that the evidence "appears to show quite conclusively that the low self-esteem hypothesis is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation of African-American achievement levels."23

Crime, Violence, and Self-Esteem

Those who think low self-esteem is the cause of high crime rates among blacks are also wrong. According to a recent study by psychologists Roy Baumeister, Joseph Boden, and Laura Smart, "first, [this notion] does not fit the transient shifts in the crime rate among African Americans, which is now reaching its highest levels as slavery recedes farther and farther into the background. Second, self-esteem levels among African Americans are now equal to, or higher than, the self-esteem levels of whites. Third, it is far from certain that slaves had a low self-esteem."24 A study by Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major of the State University of New York at Buffalo, similarly refuted the psychological theories that claim members of stigmatized groups (blacks, for example) should possess low global self-esteem. They argued that stigmatized individuals are not simply "passive victims but are frequently able to actively protect their self-esteem from prejudice and discrimination."25

Ironically, adolescent African-American males living in impoverished neighborhoods are more likely to turn violent if schools bombard them with unearned praise. Baumeister, Boden, and Smart found that when high self-esteem is challenged by others’ negative views, egotism is threatened. People will react in one of two ways. They either lower their self-appraisal and withdraw, or they maintain their self-appraisal and manifest negative emotions toward the source of the ego threat. This response can easily become violent in individuals who place high emphasis on their self-appraisal.26

Vulnerable Children

Every day in the name of self-esteem, however, schools cheat low-income children (many of whom are black) into settling for inflated egos instead of increased knowledge. Such efforts aimed at guaranteeing minorities heightened self-esteem, coupled with lawsuits challenging minimum competency exams and proficiency tests, erroneously assume that these children’s self-esteem cannot possibly get proper nourishment in the poor households in which they are reared. Social workers and teachers create special courses and excuses for these children on a regular basis.27

In his book The Vulnerable Child, Weissbourd vehemently attacks such efforts, asserting that "although poor children are more likely to suffer an array of ... problems, the great majority of poor children are prepared to learn, at least when they begin school. Developmental delays and serious learning difficulties among children ages three to five, are higher among poor than among middle- and upper-income children ... But over 75 percent of poor children ages 6-11 have never experienced significant developmental delays, or emotional troubles, or a learning disability in childhood." Weissbourd highly discourages enrolling disadvantaged minority kids in remedial courses or special education classes, because it will only make it more difficult for them to move into the mainstream.28

From lower standards to a reduced emphasis on tests, minorities are constantly being told that their egos are somehow more fragile and thus are somehow different from the rest of America, even though they have the most to gain from traditional ways of teaching.29 In fact, blacks can flourish in this type of environment, as the experiences of schools such as Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), Xavier Prep (New Orleans), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), and Dunbar (Washington) have shown.30 African Americans excel in these schools because they are expected to strive high and achieve. Instead of offering a broad array of extracurricular classes or dumbing down their curriculum to increase their African-American pupils’ "self-esteem," they offer a strict diet of math and reading and expect students to get the job done. As Sister Helen Struder, principal of the mostly-black Holy Angels school in Chicago, says, "After all, it’s by success that you build self esteem."31

Conclusion

After years of failed experimentation, it is time to stop touting the importance of self-esteem and start providing students with the elements real self-esteem is made of. As this Policy Brief shows, building self-esteem is not only a smokescreen vis-ŕ-vis academic success, it can also lead to considerable harm. After all, as Weissbourd points out "to develop effective coping strategies, children, in fact, need to learn to manage a certain amount of disappointment and conflict."32

As schools turn against self-esteem theory, they must go back to the basics of teaching, reinstalling high standards and expectations, and holding children accountable for their actions. But these efforts ought not replace paying attention to children’s needs and concerns as individuals. Many educators agree on three general strategies:

Build the relationship between a teacher or parent and a child on respect for the child’s inborn strengths,

Help the child set goals and then link sustained effort with success, and

Examine the values you are promoting, because self-esteem is grounded on what a person values.33
The final and probably most important remedy is reintroducing parents in the education of their children. Experts unanimously agree that parental involvement in a child’s education remains one of the most important factors in determining a child’s academic success. Furthermore, parents supersede teachers at building earned self-esteem in their children through the special caring and positive/negative reinforcement that can only come with individualized interaction at home.34[/B]

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Facts and truths have nothing to do with emotional rhetoric! Stop pleading to emotions and deal withing the realm of information, facts and truths.

posted 28 March 2005 03:55 PM            

quote:

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The researchers collected all the relevant studies they could, including unpublished doctoral dissertations from across the United States, to carry out their analyses. The better the test used to measure self-esteem in the various studies, the more likely they were to find higher self-esteem overall among blacks, Gray-Little said.

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posted 28 March 2005 04:03 PM            

quote:

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Heru writes: Abaza, Posting that same article over and over again accomplishes nothing. Your self esteem argument isn't working.

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Indeed. Resort to tactics such as off topic cut and paste spamming shows one's own lack of self respect. Why do they continue to use ineffectual tactics?

see - Pseudoscience does not progress- a favorite device is the non sequitur.

posted 28 March 2005 09:51 PM            

MORE ON AFROCENTRISM

I was both amused and puzzled by Professor Asante’s letter about my opinion piece. If Asante had read my book, he would know that I have read his books. I disagree with everything he has written. Asante’s conception of history is a strange amalgam of what Nietzsche once defined as monumental and antiquarian history. Afrocentrism fits the Nietzschean definition of monumental history because it “deceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires the courageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanaticism.” Operating as antiquarian history, Afrocentrism “possesses an extremely restricted field of vision; most of what exists it does not perceive at all, and the little it does see it sees much too close up and accords everything it sees equal importance.” What Nietzsche captures here is the presentist and ahistorical nature of what passes today for alternative histories. Whether they be the fantasy of Neo-Confederatism or the myth of Aztlan, these new histories are deeply rooted in wishful thinking about the past. Like Afrocentrism, they serve a therapeutic function for the people who subscribe to their bizarre readings and imaginings of the past.

Asante understands this when he refers to Afrocentrism as a way for black people to recuperate “African agency and centeredness.” This phrase refers to a loss of self esteem. To describe a people as suffering from “menticide” which Asante defines as “suicide of the mind” is to argue that black Americans are afflicted with a form of cognitive dissonance. This line of argument is risible. Racial problems in the United States today, as they were in the past century, are structural, and no amount of thinking about Cleopatra and Ramses II—in brief, a past that never was—will alter this reality. What black people need is a useable present, not an ersatz past. I rest my case.

Clarence E. Walker
Professor of History, UC Davis

posted 28 March 2005 10:07 PM            

06.10.04

Afrocentrism: On Black Kings and Queens

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee suggested that violent, destructive hurricanes should be named after blacks — Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn — to raise their self-esteem.

But that’s nothing compared to the embarrassment I feel when “educated” blacks come up with or fall for psuedo-scientific nonsense like afrocentrism (considered a proper noun but not on this blog), something I once believed. The stereotype that blacks are not serious scholars gains credibility whenever one of these people makes headlines. "rasol fyi"

Afrocentrism in a nutshell: The ancient Egyptians were black, Cleopatra was black, the ancient Greeks stole Africa’s culture (philosophy, medicine) and claimed it as their own, Africans invented writing, had many architectural achievements, developed electricity and “early planes.” They believe that Africa is one homogeneous culture, despite the fact that many cultures exist on the continent, and that all ancient civilizations were either black or stole ideas from blacks.

Here’s the kicker: Jesus was black. Yes, despite the fact he was born in the Middle East of a Jewish mother, he was in fact a black man. Therefore, Jews and Christians hijacked Judaism and Christianity from Africans.

Afrocentrism is currently taught in some government-run (taxpayer-supported) schools. Every subject, even mathematics, is taught from an afrocentric perspective. Its utter foolishness may render you speechless. The academic geniuses in one school district in Illinois are considering offering this junk to students.

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, “Afrocentric curriculum proposed for District 65″ (registration req.), black residents in Evanston have asked the school board hacks to consider implementing an afrocentric curriculum, which they hope will raise the scores of black children:

After decades of struggle to close the achievement gap between white and black students, Evanston school officials are considering a curriculum that would emphasize African literature, history and arts as a way to improve academic performance….

White pupils in the Evanston district continue to outperform black pupils by wide margins on standardized tests. The differences on the latest 2003 Illinois State Achievement Tests were typical, showing that on 3rd-grade reading tests, 87 percent of white pupils met or exceeded standards compared with 43.4 percent of black children. Similar disparities were seen in every grade and in every subject.

At first glance, anyone with half a brain can see that this is a dumb idea, even without all the evidence completely discrediting afrocentrism. No reputable scholars acknowledge afrocentrism or even take it seriously, yet these parents think exposure to ignorant claims will raise their kids’ test scores? Get me some smelling salts!

Black “scholars” who take this stuff seriously are simply displaying naivety and incompetence. Let one of afrocentrism’s founders, Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante, expound on this silliness:

Afrocentricity seeks to re-locate the African person as an agent in human history in an effort to eliminate the illusion of the fringes. For the past five hundred years Africans have been taken off of cultural, economic, religious, political, and social terms and have existed primarily on the periphery of Europe. Because of this existence we have often participated in an anti-African racism born of the same Western triumphalism that has entrapped our minds in the West….

I believe that the European scholars who register a negative reaction to Afrocentricity do so out of a case of fear. The fear is revealed on two levels. In the first place, Afrocentricity provides them with no grounds for authority unless they become students of Africans. This produces an existential fear: African scholars might have something to teach whites.

This bogus history (which “scholars” say was destroyed by whites to downplay Africa’s greatness) is apparently designed to raise the self-esteem of black kids, which some surmise is the reason for their poor performances in school. Again, at first glance, it’s obvious that lack of parental involvement and home environments not conducive to learning (no books, too much TV viewing), coupled with unqualified teachers and the indoctrination of politically correct tripe like afrocentrism, are major reasons black children underperform in school. Why black parents allow their precious gifts from God to be experimented on by quacks is beyond me.

For more on the absurdity of afrocentrism, check out scholar Mary Lefkowitz, who wrote an excellent book, Not Out of Africa. Dinesh D’Souza wrote a good article about afrocentrism.

Additionally, University of California history professor Clarence Walker has written extensively on the subject. He says, “Afrocentrism is a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic,” writes Walker. “It suggests that nothing important has happened in black history since the time of the pharaohs and thus trivializes the history of black Americans. Afrocentrism places an emphasis on Egypt that is, to put it bluntly, absurd.”

If blacks want to study myth, legend and outright lies, they should do so on their own time with their own money. But they cross the clear line of rationality when they want to poison young black minds with this garbage and make you pay for it.

While the grown-ups are puffing themselves up about so-called African accomplishments, these poor children are taught distortions and lies in the name of “ethic pride.” The result? White students, who study real accomplishments by Western cultures, including the black American sub-culture, will continue to outperform black students. Afrocentrism is just another way to divert the blame for black failures to someone or something else. As usual, it’s the kids who suffer.

But at least they’ll feel good about themselves.

posted 28 March 2005 10:44 PM            

quote:

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Ethnic Pseudoscience

Of course Deloria is not the first American ethnic to question mainstream science and scholarship. Deloria's closest pseudoscientific cousins may be in the Afrocentric movement. African-American "melanin scholars", for example Martin Bernal, have as their basic tenet that melanin (the pigment found in all humans) has remarkable properties (Ortiz de Montellano 1991, 1991/1992; Griffin 1996; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996). So those who have lots of melanin have large powers.

Thus it is melanin that is responsible for the athletic prowess of African-Americans and for the superior intelligence and extra-sensory potential of blacks in general. Melanin also accounts for the achievements of the ancient Egyptians, who were black, according to the melanin scholars. This allows the melanin scholars to provide pseudoscientific underpinnings for an Afrocentric creation myth. According to the melanin scholars, then, it was melanin that allowed Africans to "invent" fire, language, and time.

None of this would matter much if scholars who know better would respond to such arguments on their merits. But educated people of good will recognize in such scholarship the aspirations of disadvantaged peoples for a place at the table of learning. Sympathizing as they do with the yearnings of the dispossessed, educated people of good will often pretend to see real contributions to learning in ethnic pseudoscience and pseudoscholarship.

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posted 29 March 2005 03:12 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
[ Sorry Professor....my thread.

Please respond on topic or not at all, thank you.

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Does he *ever* respond to the topic at hand?

quote:

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rasol:

Indeed. Resort to tactics such as off topic cut and paste spamming shows one's own lack of self respect. Why do they continue to use ineffectual tactics?

see - Pseudoscience does not progress- a favorite device is the non sequitur

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posted 29 March 2005 06:22 AM            

Racial problems in the United States today, as they were in the past century, are structural, and no amount of thinking about Cleopatra and Ramses II—in brief, a past that never was— will alter this reality. What black people need is a useable present, not an ersatz past. I rest my case.

Clarence E. Walker
Professor of History, UC Davis

posted 29 March 2005 06:27 AM            

non sequitur - a statement not logically related to the subject, often made in an effort to change the subject.

posted 29 March 2005 07:31 AM            

quote:

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Thirty years after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King -- We still have a dream!

Solutions to Black Predicaments: Changing the Mindset of People in Mental Slavery!

The implications an the after-effects of slavery, did a lot of damage to both the minds and the economy of colored people even years after slavery. Racism still flourishes in society. Unfortunately, it is one of those predicaments Blacks have to face in their economic struggle. Our yelling reaction to racism has lost its fire. For many years we sang the song, did the dance, walked the march in the process of outcry about the painful effects of racism. Things have changed and times are different, but many Blacks today are suffering from the after-effects of the struggle for justice. They are mentally lost in a time warp!

There was nothing wrong with the struggle, yet it left us mentally crippled due to our behavioral choices and actions. We developed the attitude, "Whites must do something for us, or else." We decided to fold our arms, sit down, and watch: "See what the White folks are going to do now!" This behavior indirectly amounted to a surrender for some, and a life of dependency for others not withstanding the success of many hard-working Blacks. But it did not resolve the serious problems of our inability to develop and orchestrate effective strategies to solve social problems at the community levels. We became so entangled with the struggle that even when lights came back on, we were unable to see. Because we vented energy in yelling our outrage against injustice, we ran out of energy to do anything else for ourselves. We want the government to do everything for us, including coming inside our homes to raise our children and chasing the drug dealers from our communities. Yet nothing the government does ever pleases us. Please my people!!

The sight of some Blacks with poor work ethics on the job leads some employers to swear never to hire fools like that. Their color makes absolutely no difference; wrong is wrong! Some Blacks will fight on the job so loudly over trivial matters you may think they are possessed by demons. They say hypertension is killing Black people; it's probably self-imposed.

Now, our children are in trouble in the streets! We are unable to understand that kids' behavior reflects adults' behavior. We are not satisfied with our political and economic gains, and we can't seem to find ways to mobilize effective forces for corrective changes in order to rebuild the Black families and communities in the inner cities. Who do you blame? Blame the Whites folks?

Looking at our problems and what we have been doing, the solution is simple. We must change our slave mentality to one of thinking we are free and capable of doing things for ourselves, instead of carrying protest signs in front of White restaurants. Many times we sabotage our own efforts on the job due to inability to resolve our differences with other Blacks.

Protest time is over, folks! Burn those protest signs! After studying the behavior of Blacks from poorly educated to well educated, from those in abject poverty to those on top of the world; rolling in money and fame, one thing is clear; many of us still act as if we internalize inferiority. While some, although out of the ghetto, retain their ghetto mentality and sometimes bring that to work.

In business, Blacks run away from other Blacks at the drop of a hat even though we may belong to the same social or even professional organizations. We are always dying for other people's approval so badly that we refuse to embrace our own. This self-imposed inferiority complex has done more damage to our progress than any history of racism. As long as we entertain such belief, we will never find a way out of this shadow of darkness to save the Black families. The Whites ain't got nothing to do with it!

Black family in chaos

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posted 29 March 2005 10:32 AM            

Argumentum ad hominem - personal attacks which seek to evade the facts presented.

posted 30 March 2005 07:29 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
Pseudoscientific fallacies of logic and reason include... red herring, flawed analogy and...

Argumentum ad hominem - personal attacks which seek to evade the facts presented.

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Tactics with which every Afrocentrist is intimately familiar:

"Today, Afrocentrism is a racist, highly conservative, nationalist pseudo-science (by the latter term I mean: based upon phony scholarship and premises). It victimizes black students almost exclusively, since it is they who have this nonsense foisted off upon them as truth."

posted 30 March 2005 07:42 AM            

quote:

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Tactics with which every Afrocentrist is intimately familiar

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posted 30 March 2005 07:48 AM            

Thought posts:

quote:

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Here is one that I just came across thanks to PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3205_vinland.html

NARRATOR: “But Father Fischer's private scholarship was about to collide with world history. For in 1938, German forces marched into Austria, seized Stella Matutina College, evicted the priests and confiscated everything of value including art, rare books and, Seaver believes, Father Fischer's Vinland Map.
Hitler's campaign of world conquest was fueled by a belief in an Aryan master race, embodied by Germans who traced their cultural roots to the Vikings. In the hands of the Nazis, the Vinland Map would be a historic claim to America and a powerful political weapon.
If Seaver is right, Father Fischer used his knowledge of ancient maps and Viking history to draw the Vinland Map on an authentic piece of medieval parchment. Fischer's Vinland Map was then confiscated by the Germans, and after their defeat, the map found it's way into the hands of known fascist and Nazi sympathizer, Enzo Ferrajoli.”

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posted 30 March 2005 08:09 AM            

quote:

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These afrocentrist actually degarade black people by basically saying that nothing of importance happened for blacks after AE.

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posted 30 March 2005 11:51 AM            

quote:

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Thought, used some of your stuff on Greece at a dinner party last weekend and got all the laughs.

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posted 30 March 2005 04:26 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
There is no such thing as a Eurocentric Keins. That is a little fantasy cooked up in the minds of people who are preoccupied by their race, like yourself. Keins...you are black, you were born black and you will die black. Why spend all of the years you have PREOCCUPIED by blackness. Join the world, go out and lead a full life and leave the bitterness to the racists like rasol. IBM and GE don't care if you are green. If you can make them money you have a place in the world. This need globalism CREATED by western society and led by the US and UK has a place for everyone , regardless of race.

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posted 30 March 2005 04:44 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
There is no such thing as a Eurocentric Keins. That is a little fantasy cooked up in the minds of people who are preoccupied by their race....

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Professor, we've been over this!!>>Historical & Cultural Biases of the West!!

How could you possible deny the existence of Eurocentrism if racism and white supremacy exist, since these are the products of Eurocentrism?!!

The concept of Eurocentrism is not a recent conjure by blacks, but is a fact that has existed since Europeans or "the West" first rose as a world power! All non-Westerners, that is "people of color" not just blacks were more than aware of the mentality that is Eurocentrism! It's only been recently that white Westerners became aware of it also and are trying to correct their past mistakes. Tell me, why do you think the whole academic community of the West, especially in the heart of Western Europe, is having such a big discourse and is re-evaluating all of its past works?!

posted 30 March 2005 09:44 PM            

quote:

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There was nothing wrong with the struggle, yet it left us mentally crippled due to our behavioral choices and actions. We developed the attitude, "Whites must do something for us, or else." We decided to fold our arms, sit down, and watch: "See what the White folks are going to do now!" This behavior indirectly amounted to a surrender for some, and a life of dependency for others not withstanding the success of many hard-working Blacks. But it did not resolve the serious problems of our inability to develop and orchestrate effective strategies to solve social problems at the community levels. We became so entangled with the struggle that even when lights came back on, we were unable to see. Because we vented energy in yelling our outrage against injustice, we ran out of energy to do anything else for ourselves. We want the government to do everything for us, including coming inside our homes to raise our children and chasing the drug dealers from our communities. Yet nothing the government does ever pleases us. Please my people!!

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posted 30 March 2005 09:46 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
Pseudoscience rely on every kind of fallacy of logic and reason - A favorite device is the non sequitur.

non sequitur - a statement not logically related to the subject, often made in an effort to change the subject.

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posted 01 July 2005 01:03 AM            

This may take the forms of exemption from principles commonly thought relevant to the subject matter, [Howells flawed dataset which lacks relevant data for native East Africans] claims to data that are inherently unverifiable, perhap as because too remote or impossible to define clearly.

http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/Forum8/HTML/002206.html

posted 01 July 2005 07:54 AM            

vs.

A professor's expert analysis:

quote:

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"Today, Afrocentrism is a racist, highly conservative, nationalist pseudo-science (by the latter term I mean: based upon phony scholarship and premises). It victimizes black students almost exclusively, since it is they who have this nonsense foisted off upon them as truth.

The fact that it is tolerated and even promoted at various universities, including the one I teach at, is a tribute to higher education's racism against black students. This kind of worthless, reactionary crap would never be tolerated if it were being purveyed to white students!"

-- Grover Furr, Montclair State University

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posted 01 July 2005 07:58 AM            

Argumentum ad hominem - personal attacks which seek to evade the facts presented.

posted 01 July 2005 01:48 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by ABAZA:
Now, this part of the above posted article, really sums up the Attitude of many Afrocentrics and their followers.

[This message has been edited by ABAZA (edited 30 March 2005).]

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This is part of the reason why Black Africans do better in America than African Americans. However, all of this is due to the caste system in America. By the way, it is not just America but anywhere such a caste system exists. Go to India and see how the untouchables are working through centuries of oppression via government. Go to England and study Irish oppression. They remarks you have posted actually works well in many caste societies. I remember reading an article years ago about the complaint of Englishmen in regards to the strain on the economy due to Irish people.

Not sure what this has to do with Egypt or anthropology or trying to define the lineage and genetics of these people? Can you explain this or are you afraid that you would be too overtly bigoted in doing so?