After America - Mark Steyn [77]
THE FEELIES
Way back in 1993, in The American Educator, Lillian Katz, professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois, got the lie of the land:
A project by a First Grade class in an affluent Middle Western suburb that I recently observed showed how self-esteem and narcissism can be confused. Working from copied pages prepared by the teacher, each student produced a booklet called “All About Me.” The first page asked for basic information about the child’s home and family. The second page was titled “What I like to eat,” the third was “What I like to watch on TV,” the next was “What I want for a present.” ...
Each page was directed toward the child’s basest inner gratifications. Each topic put the child in the role of consumer—of food, entertainment, gifts, and recreation. Not once was the child asked to play the role of producer, investigator, initiator, explorer, experimenter, or problem-solver.57
Professor Katz recalled walking through a school vestibule and seeing a poster that neatly summed up this approach to education—a circle of clapping hands surrounding the slogan:
We Applaud Ourselves.
And not for the Latin scores. Our students are certainly expert at applauding themselves, with levels of “self-esteem” growing ever more detached from more earthbound measures of achievement. A 2003 OECD study asked pupils of many lands whether they got “good marks in mathematics.”58 Seventy-two percent of U.S. students said yes. Only 56 percent of Finns did, and a mere 25 percent of Hong Kong pupils. Yet, according to another OECD study of the world’s Ninth Graders, Hong Kong has the third best math scores in the world, Finland the second, and the top spot goes to Taiwan (which didn’t participate in the earlier feelgood study, presumably because their self-esteem levels are so low they’re undetectable).59 Where do all those Americans so confident of their “good marks” in math actually rank in the global Hit Parade? Number 35, between Azerbaijan and Croatia. We barely scrape the Top 40 in actual math, but we’re Number One in self-esteem about our math.
Lillian Katz made her observations in the early Nineties. Fifteen years later, a generation expertly trained in tinny self-congratulation went out and voted for a candidate who told them:
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
There’s a lot of it about in the age of self-esteem. No satirist could invent a better parody of solipsistic sloth dignified as idealism than a bunch of people sitting around waiting for themselves. Hey, man, you’re already there. What are you waiting for?
Many electors voted for Barack Obama in order to check “vote for a black president” off America’s to-do list. Framed like that, it sounds worthy and admirable. But one could also formulate it less attractively: they voted for Obama in order to feel good about themselves. Which is what “celebrating diversity” boils down to.
As for feelings in general, Obama himself is the perfect emblem of the Age of Empathy. Unlike the hard-faced Bush regime, he “cared.” After all, he told us so. Asked what he’s looking for in a Supreme Court justice, he gave the correct answer: “The depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”60 In a TV infomercial a few days before his election, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief ” was that