Touchy Feely History

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

Applying the touchy feely approach to American history can make already chaotic classrooms even more dysfunctional.

“California requires that all instructional materials in American History pass a social content review,” author and scholar Christina Hoff Sommers [pictured] reports. “The courses must foster individual development and build self-esteem.”

Sommers, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) co-authored the recently released book One Nation under Therapy with psychiatrist Sally Satel. The therapeutic approach has extended far beyond the analyst’s couch, the two authors found.

For example, the widely-used “9-11 as history” curriculum features a lesson plan for kindergarten through second grade called “All kinds of feelings.” This lesson plan encourages teachers to ask such questions as, “How would you feel if someone knocked over a tower of blocks you just built?” and culminates in a “feelings dance,” according to Sommers.

This particular program, produced by the Family and Work Institute (FWI), also includes a course called “Building strength through knowledge” that teaches that “There are no rights and wrongs when it comes to feelings and opinions.” Bank One, IBM and GE helped to underwrite this educational package, Sommers points out.

The degree to which the educational establishment has embraced the therapeutic approach to learning can be seen very dramatically in the manner in which the venerable National Education Association (NEA) responded to the two most devastating attacks on American soil in history. After the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the NEA published a book entitled The Education of Free Men in a Democracy by Richard Counts.

After the 9-11-2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the NEA erected a web site called Remembering September 11th. This web site focused on children’s mental health and featured coloring exercises.

Sommers also penned the bestselling books Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against the Boys. The noted author says that politically correct emphasis on sensitivity has even corrupted the Girl Scouts.

“The Girl Scouts now give out stressless badges which they can earn by focused breathing, exchanging foot massages or keeping a feelings diary,” Sommers said at a recent seminar at AEI. She noted ruefully that, “The Girl Scouts used to stress self-reliance.”

Other politically incorrect targets of the therapy lobby include seemingly innocuous childhood games such as tag and dodgeball, Sommers points out. Red pens used by teachers for marking papers also are a bright target for the politically sensitive crowd.

“A teacher in New York City says red is ‘in your face,’” said Sommers. “He favors purple.”

What is the empirical evidence that this approach to learning and living works? According to Sommers and Satel, precious little data would lead the objective observer to conclude that “I’m okay, you’re okay” is A-OK.

The authors point to a survey that broke students down into three categories: Those who repress their feelings, those who sensitize their feelings or express them and the intermediate group in between. The evidence clearly shows that the repressers are more successful, Sommers observes.

Satel, with her training in psychiatry, observed that the let-it-all-hang-out approach sometimes yields bizarre results when psychiatrists who advocate try out their theories on an international scale. Tsunami victims abroad and Albanian Kosovar refugees in the United States had little desire to bond with American grief counselors.

The Tsunami survivors were seeking food, shelter and, above all, relatives, rather than counselors. The refugees did indeed want to tell their stories, not to mental health professionals but to Amnesty International caseworkers and war crimes investigators.

Part of the reason that therapy in all things is so prized in America today stems from the perverse incentives that go with mental health treatment, both ladies agree. The subsidies of diagnosed disabilities and of those who counsel and treat patients with these exotic, recently unearthed maladies would seem to provide the opportunities that carry such incentives with them.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.