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

and I have achieved a great deal – in the end to achieve nothing.
    Any ideas? I’ll give you a clue – he was voted the
Greatest Briton of the Twentieth Century
. 4
    Winston Churchill, who spoke the sad line above to his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne, was sent off to boarding school before he was eight whereupon he was effectively forgotten about by his parents. His sense of rejection and sadness haunted him all his life. In the book
Churchill’s Black Dog
, psychiatrist Anthony Storr quotes Randolph Churchill as saying, ‘The neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days’ and cites his mother’s failure to reply to his letters from school or visit him as a key reason for him feeling ‘exceptionally lonely and abandoned’. Storr says:
    We are, I believe, entitled to assume that Winston Churchill was deprived by parental neglect of this inner source of self esteem uponwhich most predominantly happy persons rely, and which serves to carry them through the inevitable disappointments and reverses of human existence.
    (Storr 1989)
    Churchill’s last words before slipping into a coma in 1965? ‘I am bored with it all.’
    Which brings us to Karen Carpenter. In various sources relating to her life and death there are references to her relationship with her mother. I once heard a radio interview years ago where a friend of the family described how Karen Carpenter’s mother ‘never said she loved her’. Maybe it was the same friend, Frenda Franklin, who is quoted in the New York Times as saying:
    Karen’s mother never told her she was a good singer.
    ( www.nytimes.com/1996/10/06/magazine/karen-carpenter-s-second-life.html?pagewanted=1 )
    (When we work with parents, by the way, we always recommend three things they can do for their children each day: tell them you love them, praise them for at least one thing and, because we know incontrovertibly that appropriate physical contact helps the brain develop in a healthy way, hug them.)
    Although there are arguments from a neurological point of view that the psychological flaws in an individual are laid down around the age of three 5 (researchers who looked at 1,000 children and then re-examined them at age 26 found that ‘children’s early-emerging behavioral styles can foretell their characteristic behaviors, thoughts, and feelings as adults, pointing to the foundations of the human personality in the early years of life’), it is claimed that self-esteem starts to fall into place between the ages of five and eight. 6 Before that, feeling capable and feeling loveable work independently of each other. At this stage, according to the research quoted by Flinders University in Australia, self-esteem can be seen to operate across five areas of a child’s life –‘physical appearance, social acceptance, scholastic ability, athletic and artistic skills and behaviour’.
    According to the turn of the century US sociologist Charles Cooley, we have what he called a ‘looking glass self’. 7 Who we come to think of as who we are is just what we see reflected in the way others see us. And this is something that starts at an early age. Just who are these ‘others’? In childhood, according to Jaana Juvonen and Kathryn R. Wentze in their fascinating book
Social Motivation: Understanding Children’s School Adjustment
, they can be divided into four groups – peers, parents, teachersand an individual’s best friend (Juvonen and Wentze 1996). And they are in this order in terms of their influence too, although the last one clearly lags behind the other three.
    Parents may play a hugely important role in the development of a child’s sense of self-worth and their self-esteem (and it would appear mothers especially so – there is even evidence of a correlation between a mother’s low expectations of her daughter and that daughter’s subsequent sense of having little control over her life 8 ) but the teacher can and does make a significant difference too, for better or for worse. The authors of the study are at pains to point out that the teacher effect ‘correlates significantly’, even suggesting that their research may have not fully revealed the significance of the teacher effect:
    The correlation between teacher approval and self esteem may actually underestimate the influence of a given teacher in a child’s life.
    They also reveal – and this is