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| Home Front: Culture Wars | |
| I'm OK, You're Not Learning | |
| 2018-04-10 | |
Longtime Democratic lawmaker John Vasconcellos died in 2014, but the educational disaster he laid on California in the 1980s lives on. Indeed, its likeness thrives today across a broad swath of America’s K‐12 schooling, supported by foundation grants, federal funding, and both nonprofit and for-profit advocacy groups. Only its name has changed‐from self-esteem to social-emotional learning. If only the trend had stayed in the Golden State. Younger readers may not remember Vasconcellos, the assemblyman and state senator whom one obituary described as a "titan of the human-poten-tial movement." In 1986, Vasconcellos managed to persuade California’s con-servative Republican governor, George Deukmejian, to support a blue-ribbon task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. The ensuing hoopla loosed a tsunami of enthusiasm for building self-esteem as a solution for almost everything that ails an individual, including low achieve-ment in school. The task force’s final report, in 1990, ascribed (as I wrote at the time) "near-magical powers to self-esteem, characterizing it as ’something that empowers us to live responsibly and that inoculates us against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic wel-fare dependency, and educational failure.’ " | |
| Posted by:746 |
| #2 Nothing is ok and we are all burning! |
| Posted by: Jack Chaiter7913 2018-04-10 10:04 |
| #1 More "New Math" - new education concepts that will stem the tide of morons while enriching the people doing educational studies and reports. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2018-04-10 09:54 |