C for Corpulent
Kerry Howley | February 6, 2007, 2:01pm
Over at America's Newspaper, Paul Greenberg thinks giving kids BMI report cards is a fabulous idea. He thinks this because teaching self-esteem in public schools was a bad idea. And as it turns out, some people who are into self-esteem are anti-BMI.
Remember self-esteem? It was one of the sillier -- and more dangerous -- fads in educational circles, which keep going round and round. The theory was that promoting kids' self-esteem would convince them they were great. And it just might. But that's no guarantee they are great.
[Arkansas Gov. Mike] Beebe came out against schools' sending reports home about overweight kids lest we hurt their "self-esteem." What kind of report? It's called a body-mass index, which measures how fat or skinny a kid is -- based on factors like height, weight, age and sex.
The theory behind the Cult of Self-Esteem is simple: First get the cart, then put it before the horse. Just feel good about yourself and achievement will follow automatically.
Self-esteem classes were a "dangerous" educational fad. Therefore, if you worry about a kid's sense of self-worth, you must be a loony leftist bent on the destruction of protestant virtue. Does it need to be said that being against self-esteem instruction doesn't entail support for everything that could plausibly damage a 9-year-old's self-image? I guess it does.
The ever-slender Jacob Sullum on BMI report cards here.
kevrob | February 6, 2007, 3:53pm | #
Grotius: Nathaniel Branden, after his split with Rand, sold a ton of books with titles like
The Psychology of Self-Esteem. He was trying to help neurotic individuals by discovering what harsh judgments of their self-worth they had internalized. I think he had something there, even if he may have oversold it, like most self-help gurus. He did emphasize that, aside from one's inherent self-worth as a human being, real self-esteem arises from learning to be a competent adult. I tend to take the view that one should avoid both underestimating and overestimating one's self-worth.
Back in the Cretaceous Period, when I was a parochial schoolboy, we had annual health examinations. These were done so that we kids could qualify for low-cost insurance the school offered, covering playground accidents and other vissisitudes of childhood. If your family didn't want to be examined by the doctor the school provided, they could make an appointment with the family physician, who would supply a letter to the insurers. We also had to show a clean bill of health before joining youth sports, like Little League. If a doctor saw a child who was abnormally chubby, he could tell Mom and Dad, "Junior needs to lose some weight." Teachers never came into it, though a PE instructor might chide the slow and heavy to get their asses off the couch and move them periodically.
Maybe schools don't so much of this sort of thing anymore, but I wouldn't think that having Ed School grads "diagnosing" their charges is very smart. Look how well that's turned out in the ADD/ADHD controversy!
There was many a chunky kid who slimmed down when he got a growth spurt, or after he hit puberty. Others put on the weight as they got older. Whether that extra mass was muscle or fat probably had as much to do with the child's activity level as it did calorie consumption.
In my case, I was always more than slim, but not really fat. In retrospect, I was a fatty waiting to happen. I only made a school sports team once (7th grade), but I did spend a good bit of my free time bicycling or swimming, and I usually walked or biked home from school. Once I adopted a more sedentary adult lifestyle extra poundage became insanely easy to pack on, and hard to lose. Dicovering beer didn't help, nor did the realization that adults can have as much pizza as they can pay for.
Today's students may sit around playing video games too much, but I used to lounge around watching TV or reading. Depending on whether I had my nose stuck in a newspaper, book, magazine or comic, I was either improving my mind or rotting it. Either way, my Dad would remind me that the sun was shining and that I might want to get some exercise.
Mens sana in corpore sano, after all, which was just the sort of sentiment a fellow with a Masters in P.E. & Health would have. Our high school had P.E. every third day, and we had daily recess in grammar school, if infrequent gym. I gather that those practices are in decline in many schools.
Today is the second day our local schools are closed due to extreme cold. I'll give the little punks a pass on going outside when it's 0°F, but if it were in the teens or twenties and we had a snow day, it would have been all-day pond hockey for me. Nowadays the cops chase the kids off the ice in the parks, even if it's been shown to be safe enough for skating, because the pols are so fearful of lawsuits should someone get hurt. Their are even people agitating for mandatory helmets when the kids go sledding!
Maybe parents should agitate for regular P.E. in their school, recess for they younger kids, and get their kids into after-school activities that encourage exercise, at the Y or the Boys & Girls Clubs or wherever. The "some stranger is out to kidnap and rape my child" meme seems to have put paid to the kind of unorganized afterschool adventures my siblings and friends used to have when we were kids.
Kevrob
