Justified Self‐Esteem

This paper develops a thread of argument from previous contributions to this journal by Richard Smith and Ruth Cigman about the educational salience of self‐esteem. It is argued—contra Smith and Cigman—that the social science conception of self‐esteem does serve a useful educational function, most importantly in undermining the inflated self‐help conception of self‐esteem that has commonly been transposed to the educational arena. Recent findings about a lack of significant correlation between low global self‐esteem and relevant educational variables help us to focus on the type of self‐esteem that does matter in the classroom: justified domain‐specific self‐esteem, in which the chief domains in question are the school subjects and students' self‐respect. Moreover, this paper suggests that low self‐confidence—which is a real problem for many students—may often be mistaken for low self‐esteem.