Most contemporary North Americans, as well as many other
Westerners, take for granted their conceptions of themselves as
individuals with uniquely valuable and complex inner lives - lives
filled with beliefs, imaginings, understandings, and motives that
determine their actions and accomplishments. Yet, such
psychological conceptions of selfhood are relatively recent, dating
mostly from the late eighteenth century. Perhaps more surprisingly,
our understandings of ourselves as creatively self-expressive and
strategically self-managing are, for the most part, products of
twentieth-century innovations in Enlightenment-based social
sciences, especially psychology. Fueled by the enthusiasm for
self-expression and self-actualization that emerged in the 1960s,
humanistic, cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists
published widely on the overwhelmingly positive consequences of
increased self-esteem in children and adolescents. While previous
generations had been wary of self-confidence and self-interest,
these qualities became widely regarded as desirable traits to be
cultivated in both the home and the school. In The Education of
Selves, Jack Martin and Ann-Marie McLellan examine ways in which
psychological theories, research, and interventions employed in
American and Canadian schools during the last half of the twentieth
century changed our understanding of students, conceptualizing
ideal students as self-expressive, enterprising, and entitled to
forms of education that recognize and cater to such expressivity
and enterprise. The authors address each of the major programs of
psychological research and intervention in American and Canadian
schools from 1950 to 2000: self-esteem, self-concept,
self-efficacy, and self-regulation. They give critical
consideration to definitions and conceptualizations, research
measures and methods, intervention practices, and the social,
cultural consequences of these programs of inquiry and practice.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a backlash
against what some have come to regard as a self-absorbed generation
of young people. Such criticism may be interpreted, at least in
part, as a reaction to the scientific and professional activities
of psychologists, many of whom now appear to share in the general
concern about where their activities have left students, schools,
and society at large.
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