It’s all about me, me, me
Regular visitors to this blog are probably glad I wasn’t a Girl Scout, considering,

The Girl Scouts of America recently launched a major campaign “to address the problem of low self-esteem among 8- to 14-year-old girls.” (Never mind that there is no good evidence these girls suffer a self-esteem deficit.) With the help of a $2.65 million grant from Unilever (a major corporation that owns products such as Lipton and Slim Fast), its new program, “Uniquely ME!,” asks girls to contemplate their own “amazing” specialness. Girls are invited to make collages celebrating themselves. They can play a getting-to-know-me game called a “Me-O-Meter.”

Considering how self-centered The Bad Hair Blog writing can get, it boggles the mind to ponder what I’d be writing about if I’d had Me-O-Meter training. The teachers at the all-girls’ school I attended used emphatic red pencil marks when correcting homework, too. Nobody felt any need to promote our self-esteem, but, in at least one instance (ehem) self-esteem obviously thrived.

The authors of Uniquely ME! and the executives at Unilever who funded it should take a careful look at an article in the January issue of Scientific American that debunks the self-esteem movement. (“Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth.”) The authors, four prominent academic psychologists, conclude, “We have found little to indicate that indiscriminately promoting self-esteem in today’s children or adults, just for being themselves, offers society any compensatory benefits beyond the seductive pleasure it brings to those engaged in the exercise.”

It’s time to dump the Me-O-Meter.

Speaking of self-esteem, George Will writes,

But let Blair sit until Oct. 21, the 200th anniversary of Lord Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon’s fleet at Trafalgar. The British will celebrate in the modern manner: very sensitively. The naval engagement will be re-enacted in British waters. But to spare French pride, that tender thing tethered to not much since Trafalgar, the fleets will not be labeled British and French. They will be called “red” and “blue.”

Nothing boosts self-esteem like sparing the losers having to learn anything from defeat.

Both articles found at Real Clear Politics