ISSUES
: Body Confidence
Chapter 2: Self-esteem
37
after the skull, character is the second hardest part of
the body.
In a similar vein, there is nothing non-cognitive about
character virtues, even of the performance kind. For
example, resilience is all about certain beliefs you
harbour about your chances of overcoming adversity.
All virtues, performance-driven, moral and intellectual,
comprise a clear cognitive element.
Please, no comeback for self-
esteem
When spelling out her priorities on character education,
Morgan explained: “What I mean is a focus on things like
the additional character skills we all need to get on in life
– resilience, grit, self-esteem, self-confidence.”
I thought self-esteem had been laid to rest as an
educational aim after the famous meta-analysis by
American psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues
in 2003. It seems not. There were some salient findings
from their research and from my further review of the
1990s’ “self-concept” industry, focused on debates
around self-esteem, self-confidence and self-respect.
These included that high general self-esteem is more
pernicious than low self-esteem – it is more clearly
connected to variables such as unprotected sex, bullying
and experimenting with drugs. A likely explanation is
that high self-esteem gives the person a false sense of
invulnerability to negative consequences. Moderate and
realistic self-esteem is, rather, the ideal psycho-moral
state.
At the same time, while correlations have been found
between self-esteem in maths and maths scores, the
maths results are more likely to cause the self-esteem,
rather than the other way around.
Who we are deep down
The return of debates around self-esteem and self-
confidence is potentially more counter-productive for
the character agenda than the focus on resilience – as
almost no eminent social scientists take it seriously any
more. To put it simply, character is much more about
who we really are deep down rather than who we think
we are.
It is heartening to see messages and findings from our
work at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues
gradually filtering through to UK politicians. But, as
yet, their faculty to express their new-found interest
still lags slightly behind their enthusiasm for conveying
the message that character matters for academic
achievement and general human flourishing.
17 December 2014
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