Memories of the 28th Century
Unclear About Standards
by , 06-25-2015 at 03:08 PM (1476 Views)
Increasingly over time I have noticed that people are less impressed by the difference between correct and incorrect, but the problem has become a serious problem in recent time. In former times there were criminals who made a living by ignoring standards, but in recent decades it has even gotten into elementary schools, where there seems to be little difference between correct and incorrect answers.
That’s a minor problem in elementary school, but it seems to have seeped into many parts of society, and I think that the recent expansion of this ignorance of standards can be blamed on the Self-Esteem Movement. It was thought that students would do better if they were praised than if teachers told that that they had messed up. The recent literature seems to indicate that students prefer to be told something near the truth, rather than being given false praise, but that hasn’t been accepted in education, yet. Unfortunately, it appears that there has been spill over into other fields after students get into what used to be the real world.
It is difficult to determine with complete confidence the origins of some ideas, but I was wondering if the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 was a result of the self-esteem movement? People who were thoroughly imbued with those ideals were in evidence in business at the time, and the idea that everyone should be able to get a mortgage fits right in with self-esteem. Some of the ways that subprime mortgages were designed were very egalitarian, which is typical of the self-esteem movement.
Another security of that crisis was the "credit default swap", which paid the owner, if the subject of the swap defaulted. So a company could set up a huge number of losing investments and buy credit default swaps that would pay, if they defaulted on the underlying investments. Few default swaps were paid, because the companies that held them went into receivership and the court or the entity that controlled did not exercise, and there came to be doubt as to the validity of the swaps. AIG was covered several times over, but the company still went into receivership.
Another matter that has some of the marks of self-esteem branded onto it is the climate change thing. The climate change alarmists seem to have no concept of the difference between fact and wish, and they give equal credit to fact and fiction, true and false, and so on. It is as if they are saying: “This makes me feel good, so it has to be good. My teachers never marked anything as wrong when I cried, so I’ll just cry when anyone doesn’t like my ideas." As a result, the climate change material looks like propaganda, but it is actually the wishes of some people who didn't do well in school but didn't receive appropriately poor grades, because of the influence of the self-esteem movement, and that resulted in them thinking they were doing wonderfully in their academic studies, but they weren't.
I am only touching the surface of this matter, because I am not learned in regard to the Millennials; although I have come to understand that they have certain problems with the real world. It is possible that their early training is at least partly to blame for their problems; it's worth thinking about.
What do you think? Is the self-esteem movement partly to blame for some of the poor science and activity in other spheres of business? Has the lacking of early differentiation between correct and incorrect led to the inability to get things right?
Since I first thought of this matter, I have thought of and observed the situation in more places, so I may come back to this soon.
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