The Washington Post has discovered something heretofore not known to mankind: Giving fake praise to children isn’t such a good thing!
Here’s a snippet:
A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities.
“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”
Another stupid liberal education idea bites the dust. Too bad we are not killing these dumb ideas sufficiently fast enough to catch the Chinese, Koreans and Indians who will soon clobber us in the education. And the big irony is that they will do it by simply using all the great ideas we once had and have now thrown away in the name of the “modern left-wing agenda”.
Whole word reading, timeouts, over-praise, every child gets a trophy, “discovery” math, teaching boys as if they are girls, lack of standardized testing, abandoning school uniforms, rote learning is evil, its a mighty long list of asinine ideas.
We reap what we sow.
And they are just figuring this out now?
Gee. The next thing they’ll be telling us is that phonics method works the best for teaching literacy.
The question is why a Ph.D. at Stanford ever believed this.
“Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them.” – George Orwell (more or less)
Ah … one more thing I have been right about for many years … since I first became aware of it. Others are … injection sites. easy welfare, free housing for the alleged poor … Global warming foreign aid to our enemies.
In Canada it is bilingualism, public sector (especially teachers) unions, lax refugee laws, multiculturalism, metric system, Indian affairs etc … I could go on, but that ‘s enough for now.
So far I have a perfect record simply by betting agains the left. They are always wrong and never admit it even after it blows up in their faces.
This is what happens when you allow Marxist , perverts & the insane use your children for social experiments. Than call it education.
Abe….I’ve been doing very,very well betting also. It is SO simple. If any leftard/marxist/commie/facist/social yapper/UN person is for it,you know it is going to fail. Damn. You know,we conservatives good have it so good if we would just adopt that simple truism.
Things started to turn around when “they” said five cups of coffee a day are now good for you.
DUH!-George Orwell was right.
ANOTHER good reason to ignore academia and make sure our kids are as far away from them as possible!
Even children can usually spot the fakes when it comes to praise.
There’s nothing wrong with building kids’ self-esteem, but you can’t do it by protecting them from failure, you have to do it by letting them learn from their failures if necessary.
Sort of akin to those body building ads of a kid getting sand kicked in his face.
Now THATS incentive… and the kid works hard and achieves his dream.
It seems the Educational establishment has finally figured out the common sense truth that overpraise and too much self-esteem is damaging to children. It enslaves them. No apologies, though, as far as I can see. Instead, they have simply replaced “self-esteem” with a new idiocy: being more “scientific” by praising children for “building new sets of neurons in their brains.” Essential message: you are still a robot and do not have a soul. You didn’t do it, your brain did.
And get this money quote: “a mistake-free paper isn’t always the best paper.”
Er, yes it is.
Common sense is still absent, and there is a reason for that. If teachers and schools just followed common sense, students would learn much better, but there would be no room for a “profession” of teaching or for degrees in “education.” They don’t dare ever do it right.
A truth that the armed forces, drill sergeants in particular, have known for years.
Another problem with unearned praise that this article doesn’t mention is that it fosters narcissism. It was once believed that school bullies were kids who suffered from low self-esteem; studies now suggest it’s the opposite, that bullies are kids whose self-regard is so hugely inflated they feel entitled to do anything they want to anybody.
Kids get enough mollycoddling at home. School should be the place where they first realize they’re not as marvelous as their mommies think.
This will explain the current POTUS.