Pride and Prejudice

I. Scholastic Self-Esteem

In the early 1980s, motivational guru Jack Canfield and progressive California assemblyman John Vasconcellos forged a landmark alliance after both men arrived at the same conclusion about failing and demoralised students. Everybody, they decided, had been looking at the problem backwards. Lousy grades did not produce low self-esteem in kids, low self-esteem in kids produced lousy grades. To Canfield and Vasconcellos, self-esteem was the obvious and necessary precondition for scholastic achievement.