Self Esteem of course is too much of a priorty.
I am disgusted with the current state of our education system where our students' emotional feelings are valued more than our education, cousolers making sure kids feel ok.
Look at the edcuation system in China, during the first few years of elementary school they divide the students into three divisions, the smartests, average, and stupid. Destroying their self esteem you say? So what, their education at least before college is much better than ours. The tradeoff is we have the best higher education in the world, but pre univeristy education is terrible in comparison with the rest of the world.
All men are not created equal, we are given each a unique combination of DNA, and some of us have better genetics that allow us to achieve more in life than others.
The source of the self esteem problem is the elite not being able to understand, or even the average person in charge of school districts around the US, not being able to understand why the student's self esteem is so low, imagine how stupid the average person is, presumably with an IQ of 98(US average intelligence quotient), and now think half of the entire population has less of that cognitive ability, therefore less likely to succeed in school.
But the problem is even when their intelligence and scholor capablities are less than others around him/her, she/he feels the same desire to be better than the rest, and are frustrated when others perform better than him/her. They also have the same emotional delicacy and frailness as everyone else.
We are not meant to all have high self esteem, our media and system has brainwashed our children into thinking everyone wins and we are all equal when they are not. I was looking through posters along the wall of my 8th grade english classroom, we were to design a poster showing adjectives describing ourself, and one peculiar kid, who's facial feature showed severe retardation, did not know how to spell "athletic" correctly, at 8th grade, and he is average in terms of average US GPA, 2.5.
Our education system has two factors that nurture our false hope of success, by loosening our primary educational system and boosting our children's self esteem. Elementary and Middle School are too easy, compared to other cultures our kids are the most lax, having excessive time to do useless activities like Xbox, Playstation, etc.
I do not believe in making sure a child's self esteem is high, for that is not essential a successful learning career and in life.
Self esteem is something that you build, and if you possess the ability to build a good one, a realistic one, good for you, but if you cannot, you do not deserve one, but many children are being lied to by our educators, considered by many to be the most important service provided to society, the raising of our next generation.
My self confidence was crushed at a young age but I was quick to reclaim with success in grades and other academic subjects.
Wall Street Journal describing white flight in the west coast, as competition heat up because of excessive asian population, white kids move out because of the fear of competition, and their parents worry for their self esteem.
I personally think it is better for a child to be in a competitive environment where he/she is the worst, because then he/she exerts his/her best potential to the full exploitation. Not being able to work under pressure and improve yourself is the worst thing you could do, and will lead to inefficiency, inproficiency, and failure to the society itself.
A child's personality is not to be fostered, because why do we care why someone else thinks emotionally when it is irrelevant to the bettering of society? The most intelligent and able minded of us do not have such problems, and in logical cases lack of self esteem motivates the poor fellow to work harder for success self esteem itself, bettering one self for self, but also benefit society.
If everyone has a high self esteem, we will all be arrogant bastards who are too full of ourselves, overconfidence leads to self destruction.
Abolish counseling and other useless programs, abolish the no child left behind program, a program that is holding back our best to keep at the level of the worst.
Teachers do not need to be nice, but get the job done at teaching our students what they need to know, the ciriculum.
Create new laws to protect teachers against being "mean", and hire based on merit of grades of his/her students.
Emotionals are purely sentimental and useless towards society, it's sole purpose; self satisfaction.
