Decline of Feel Good?
by Renny Hartmann

Maybe the educators are learning something. In the last few months, there have been two major affirmations of traditional teaching from educationists. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics suggested that schools go back to teaching basic math and a professor at San Diego State University found that teaching “self esteemism” and “feeling good about one's self” does not improve education.

Although math has long been under fire by the loosey-goosy set, in 1989 basic math was replaced in trendy California with Mathematics for Understanding. This movement had the good intentions (they all start with good intentions) of teaching logical thinking, now called cognitive development. The problem was the methods employed de-emphasized elementary arithmetic like memorizing the times tables and produced such anomalies as “math” word problems without any numerals or calculations. By the mid-1990s, individual parents in California started worrying about their children’s lack of arithmetic skills and dubbed the entire concept “fuzzy math.”

By that time, the California fad had infected math instruction across the nation. Math scores plummeted, no surprise. Now NATM has stepped into the debate with some common sense and even an advertisement. The NATM says calculator use should be limited in elementary schools and pupils should learn the times tables by rote. Math computations should be done outside the current ubiquitous word problems. My view is, how good is it for students’ self esteem if to buy five $5 movie tickets, they have to fumble with a calculator while everyone else in line groaned. But now even the sacred text of self esteemism itself is under fire.

Professor Jean Twinge of SDSU avers that decades of praising young people for no reason has produced young persons with narcissist personalities. They cannot function without constant awards and trophies because they grew up receiving A’s for just attending class and plaques for mere bench warming. Now, even businesses say some employees must be constantly coddled and stroked even for such a common work achievements as appearing at work from Monday to Friday. These young persons have such an overweening image of themselves as wonderful and perfect that they may even become anti-social when they are not repeatedly told how terrific they are. These narcissist traits do not bode well for life-long relationships like marriage and family. They also don’t offer a positive view of social commitments like volunteering, joining para-military (fire and police) or military services, or any self sacrifice.

Since 1972, SATs and other standardized tests have demonstrated declining or stagnant scores. Finally, two members of the education establishment have blown the whistle. Although these are reasons to be hopeful about changes in public education, I doubt an immediate effect—because today’s “modern” teachers were raised under the earlier failed thinking and, unfortunately, do not know any other way to teach.