It was a catchy headline: “Choosing Self-Esteem Over Sex or Pizza.” My first reaction: false choices. Why not healthy helpings of all three?
What the story in the New York Times was about was a study done by psychologists convinced that today’s young college students are addicted to feeling good about themselves.
Batches of them were asked whether they would rather get a boost to their ego, engage in their favorite sexual activity or eat a favorite food. Most chose a boost to their ego like getting a good grade or receiving a compliment.
Critics of those conclusions observed that the kids chose good grades and compliments over sex and pizza because good grades and sincere compliments were hard to come by. Sex and pizza were not.
The critics surely were right on count one. Good grades obviously deserved first place. And forget the comparisons.
What the psychologists dem-onstrated they should already have known: college students want good grades for a raft of reasons, most of which have little to do with their self-esteem.
The rest of us also place a high value on praise from others for our accomplishments, nice things said about our appearance or our personalities. People like to be liked. No Ph.D. required to reach that conclusion.
But Jean M. Twenge and W. Campbell, who together wrote “The Narcissism Epidemic,” did psychology and today’s college kids no favor by pretending to prove that today’s campuses are teaming with egotists with nothing but self on their minds.
MY OWN SCIENTIFIC study was made on grandchildren and their friends.
Susan’s two sons, Tim and Aaron, have their bachelor’s degrees and both plan to take graduate degrees with teaching as a profession in mind. Tim just spent two years in rural El Salvador in the Peace Corps and is back there now for another nine-month tour. Aaron is working as a community organizer in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood in San Antonio.
Son Angelo has three daughters with college degrees. All three are put-others-first types who go out of their way to be contributors. Their boyfriends share that non-egotist orientation.
The young people in the First Presbyterian Church of Iola whom I have had the pleasure of watching as they graduated first from high school and then from one university or another have not gone to Wall Street to make millions in investment banking. They, like my grandkids, have become teachers, or dentists, nurses, chosen to go into a family business or started on some other community- and nation-building path.
Running my mind’s eye over the kids I know and have known, not one stands out as full of themselves. Quite the contrary: today’s youngsters seem to be more community oriented; more likely to choose service to others as a career than those who went before them.
The veterans returning from World War II — another group I knew firsthand — were far more self-oriented. We hit the college campuses running, GI Bill in hand, impatient to get that degree, start earning a living, climbing the ladder, claiming the dream.
Now that was a batch of self-absorbed men and women for sure — the one they now call the Greatest Generation.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
