Jean Twenge On Self Esteem

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In today’s society, awards, trophies, and scholarships are given out just for the sake of participation. Children will start to participate in competitions just to win awards. Many people believe that the giving of these awards will provide more self-esteem to students. Over the course of years, there has been an increase in these self-esteem programs that allow students to portray narcissism, the act of being self-centered to the point where others do not matter. In Jean Twenge’s article, An army of one: me, Twenge disdains self-esteem programs since they do not enforce strong standards that needs to be followed and do not place a strong importance on grades which will make a child more self-centered. Self-esteem programs are in place at …show more content…
With grades and standards, students will constantly want to feel superior to their friends and in order to do that, students will constantly have the urge to do better. Self-esteem programs give student a less competitive world, as every student feels superior for receiving an award for participating. Like Twenge says, “The practice of not correcting mistakes, avoiding letter grades, and discouraging competition is also misguided. Competition can help make learning fun.” (Twenge, 502) As Twenge discusses, “avoiding letter grades” will make everything easy for children in this generation, but when these children come into the real world, all grown-up, it will be hard for them to navigate through the world, because they will be too egotistic to correct their mistakes, and it will be novel for them to deal with competition. Twenge also mentions how competition also makes “learning fun”, which is absolutely true. Competition gives children a reason to work hard to strive for a better future. Competition also allows students to become more social and interactive with their environment. However, the self-esteem programs discourage competition, as it does not give an opportunity for a child to embrace his/her creativity. Difference in thinking will also encourage more competition, as one student’s fabulous solution might result in another student’s even better solution. Davidson says, …show more content…
Self-esteem programs may help some students develop a better memory, although it also encourages children to become more self-centered. Whereas grades, standards and labels play an important in keeping egocentrism away from children and help them to develop a better personality, in which they can become socially smart. Twenge also supports this idea by saying, “the school programs emphasize being “special” rather than encouraging friendships, we may be training an army of little narcissists instead of raising kids’ self-esteem.” (Twenge, 504) Twenge argues that self-esteem programs are meant to create and establish friendships and new ways to make friends, however, in actuality, they do not help children out, as they raise the children’s self-esteem to a point that it becomes narcissism. Self-esteem programs allow children to meet new people, however the meetings tend to be very self-centered where each child starts to believe that they are more talented than the other.Once children start to become narcissistic, they become more self-centered, and instead of thinking that they revolve around the world, they start to think that the world is revolving around them. Davidson mentions that it is more important to work together, rather than just being self-centered. Davidson mentions, “No matter how expert we are, no matter how brilliant, we can improve, we
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