None of this is to say that PP works (and it’s probable that some of it does and some doesn’t). I’m just noting that it has little relationship to what is covered in this article. Maybe another article that looked at evidence connected specifically to PP claims would be an interesting read. I admit having a positive regard for PP but am willing to learn from a critique of its claims. This article was not that article.

Michael”

When you feed positive psychology all the time, as they do in america, there are going to be people(young people in school and college) that think life is a fluffy fairy tale world and everything will be great. And then when they finish college, after have partying and not really having learnt anything or paid attention in class, the real world will hit them hard and they will probably work at some lousy job they don’t like, go in debt because they need to have a car, they cant afford, and life gets really hard.

But being realistic can lower unreasonable expectations of life and help prepare for what life really is instead of what we wish life was.

I think the point is, be optimistic, butt being realistic is equally important to living a decent life.

Obviously not everyone is this optimistic but when positivity is used so much and being realistic (which sometimes is pessimistic) is frowned upon, at least at my college, its not a healthy trend

None of this is to say that PP works (and it’s probable that some of it does and some doesn’t). I’m just noting that it has little relationship to what is covered in this article. Maybe another article that looked at evidence connected specifically to PP claims would be an interesting read. I admit having a positive regard for PP but am willing to learn from a critique of its claims. This article was not that article.

Michael

I have an interesting story that happened to me. I am from Nepal and from where I come the schools don’t care about the students’ self-esteem — we are expected to handle those things on our own. We have honors systems and everyone in class knows who passed or failed, but when I came to the States for higher education, I was surprised that nobody knew what other students scored and there was no ranking system. But I guess ranking is covered by GPA.

Still as a newcomer to the educational system of the US, I found that part pretty weird.

But the question which I really think is interesting is how people really get their self esteem and what are the consequences of getting it wrong? In Australia, kids in general and boys in particular get much of their self esteem from proficiency at sports. So a boy with good hand-eye co-ordination who has not much else going for him can still end up with reasonably high self esteem.

How does this translate into adult life? He’s not too bright or hardworking but because he was good at football in his youth he still reckons he’s a hell of a guy. How do these men cope when their ability with a ball is no longer valued? My theory is that they end up in business, which probably explains a lot about the quality of management in this country!

The other problem with this state of affairs is that clever hard working kids who happen not to be good at sports end up feeling less good about themselves than they should.

My point is, does it matter if people’s self esteem is based on irrelevant skills? What does it mean for a society to be obsessed with childhood achievements which generally are not valuable in adulthood? Not many people can make a living at sport, but if a boy is good at it he will be treated like some kind of demigod, and then we wonder why they don’t think the rules apply to them! But that’s another story.

I have said or thought much of this article over the past 30 years in the business world.

The next to the last paragraph reminds me of a quote, can’t remember the source:

“Pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist.”