Matt Kielty

A new Oscar-nominated film tells the story of an American journalist shot and killed by Russian troops.

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Okay, Latif, Radiolab, back with Heather and Matt and self-esteem.

Okay, so John's got a social vaccine.

Right.

Question, of course, is like, well, how do you inoculate society?

Like, what do you, how do you actually, how do you do this?

Like, how do you teach people to feel good about themselves?

And for John... The answer was... The schools.

You start with kids.

And so in the late 80s, early 90s, there was this huge push to get self-esteem into the classroom.

And suddenly there were all these like workbooks, textbooks.

So like here's one called Esteem Builders, a K-8 self-esteem curriculum.

Or the best self-esteem activities for the elementary grades.

Building self-esteem in the secondary school, teacher's manual and instructional materials.

And how this worked was, let's say you got a class of kids.

everybody good morning good morning good morning hello back there everybody yeah bring it down could be whatever grade and the teacher would have one of these workbooks which in it would contain these worksheets today we are going to do um today we're going to talk about yourself and how a lot of these begin is imagine that you're looking in the mirror but trying to get the kids to answer this really basic question what do you see

Who am I?

I look like... Brown hair, brown eyes.

A whole novel.