Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

development’),psychological (‘Past research studies have found direct links between low self-esteem and substance abuse, unprotected sex, criminal behaviors, particular personality disorders, depression, and suicide’ 1 ) and neurological (‘Robust behavioral data indicated that the participants responded relatively rapidly in the congruent condition when associating self with positive items, supporting the hypothesis that most people have a positive attitude towards self. Scalp event-related brain potential analysis revealed that self items in the congruent condition elicited a more positive ERP deflection than those in the incongruent condition between 350 and 450 ms after the onset of the self items’ 2 ) point of view, self-esteem, ‘The highest thing we can hope for’, according to the philosopher Spinoza, is your bottom line. And I say that as a teacher, as a parent of three, as a husband, as a human being and as someone who has seen the best and the very worst of the effects of self-esteem. If we want adults who are healthy both physically and mentally, who are capable of making and sustaining meaningful relationships, who can deal with challenge and stress and failure and even success in the twenty-first century, we need you to send young people away from our schools with good self-esteem, no matter what it says on their bits of paper.
    Before I give you the best definition we’ve come across of self-esteem, one I referred to in
Essential Motivation
and make no bones about referring to again, let me take you through two interesting and not a little controversial opinions about self-esteem.
    One is that you can’t raise someone’s self-esteem above your own. What are you doing to look after yourself to be able to look after others? Teaching is a hugely giving profession and, because of that, you have to take in order to have something to give. This is especially true if you are a school leader, not only in terms of looking after yourself but also because you are such a powerful model to the people who work for you (even if all they are learning is how
not
to lead a school).
    I tell headteachers of a true story I heard about from the States of a man who died at his desk at work, but no-one noticed for three days. Why? Because he was always the first one in each morning and always the last one to leave. People were so used to him being at his desk when they arrived and when they left that no-one thought to check he was still breathing. My question, then, for headteachers everywhere is this one:
    Would your staff notice if you were dead?
    The other curious idea about self-esteem is that you can’t raise someone else’s. It is not yours to raise. After all, it’s
self
-esteem. It’s not what I think about you, it’s what
you
think about you. I can think you’re a waste of space but as long as you don’t agree then your self-esteem will be OK. Alternatively, I can think you’re great but if you think you’re a waste ofspace, then me simply disagreeing with you will not change anything. And trying to ‘pump you up’ by getting you to say positive things about yourself just makes matters worse. According to
The Economist
, 3 research shows that ‘positive self-statements cause negative moods in people with low self-esteem because they conflict with those people’s views of themselves’. What I can do, though, is to create the opportunities, the ethos, and the atmosphere in which you can start to see for yourself how great you can be.
    This is what I believe was inadvertently happening with the ‘lost boys and girls’. I didn’t go in and give them some ra-ra tubthumping motivational speech. Far from it. We never touched on the issue of motivation or self-esteem or anything remotely psychological. I simply asked them questions like ‘Is it ever right to bully a bully?’ and ‘If I stick a bunch of flowers in the back of a computer does it become a vase?’
    (And so
Thunks
were born.)
    To what extent, then, are the children in your care given the opportunity to raise their own self-esteem?
    Which brings us to the best definition I have come across. Bear in mind that it is a two-part definition and what counts is that you
feel
these things, not that you
are
them. To have high self-esteem I must feel capable and I must feel loveable.
    Simple really. Yet, you know people who feel capable but don’t feel loveable don’t you? For example, who said this?
    I have worked very hard all my life,