Matt Kielty

There's like an Education Week article from 1991 that lays out that at this point already thousands of schools are starting to participate in this self-esteem curriculum.

There are over 100 workbooks to promote self-esteem in the classroom.

So it just became embraced by the educational system in a major way.

Throughout the 90s, self-esteem became the dominant language that people in the West were using to talk about themselves.

They used self-esteem to talk about their childhoods, their successes, their failures, their ambitions, just how they thought about who they were.

This is like kind of everything he dreamed of.

But should I talk about the lie a bit?

So this is the part in the story which we told you at the beginning.

Yeah, you promised this was all a fraud.

I'm waiting for the fraud.

Yeah, the lie.

Yeah, this is like Will's whole thing is that one of the things he discovered when he was reporting his book is that... In the archives, I managed to find an audio cassette recording of the actual meeting... Where the Cal Berkeley researcher hired by the task force... Presented his findings...

And he told the task force back in 1989 that, yes, they had found some compelling correlations between self-esteem and education.

But in other areas, the correlations don't seem to be so great, and we're not quite sure why.

And we're not sure when we have correlations what the causes might be.

Let's take, for example, one of the areas where the findings are a little bit loose, which has to do with self-esteem and alcoholic abuse.

By and large, there are positive correlations here.

But what does that mean in terms of cause?

Do these people go to drinking because of an earlier history of self-doubt, self-degradation, worthlessness, and so on?

Or is it the other way around?