In education worlds for several years, somehow, the self-esteem of students has come to be an ideological dividing line. Many progressivist theorists and teachers, child-centered and open to multiple learning styles, have judged esteem-building an essential element of education. Traditionalist theorists and teachers have simply suspended the issue in their work, largely doubting whether self-esteem (except for in extreme cases of one form or another) correlates very well with learning.
Recently, though, some evidence has trickled in that supports the conservative position. I summarize some of it here, and here’s the gist. Researchers studying reading scores and confidence levels of students in several nations found that overconfidence actually correlated with poor reading performance, while underconfidence did the opposite. Higher reading achievement, the researchers found, is linked to “calibration modesty.”
In that case, then the stern, critical (but attentive) teachers do more for their students than do the ego-stroking, child-centered teachers. After all, how many of us look back on those rigid and tough 8th-grade English teachers who pounded in grammar and style with an icy stare as one of the best things that ever happened in our education?