Optimism vs. Self-Esteem

I'm supposed to have a little coffee with a former mentor teacher, Mr. Slade, today, and I figure he'll probably ask me how the rest of my student teaching has been. I was thinking about how I might characterize the rest of my experience, when I thought about a book that I bought a long time ago called The Optimistic Child. The premise of the book is that adults need to stop giving children a false sense of self-esteem, and start giving them the tools and knowledge to be confident about the impact they can have on the world (optimism about their future, in other words). I bought this book way before I even thought about being a teacher; I bought it as a resource for raising my own kids, and I haven't looked at it in quite a while.

Anyway, I really agree with the main idea in this book. Is there a difference between optimism and self-esteem? I think there is. Optimism fosters a hopeful outlook on the world at large, and self-esteem fosters, imo, a sense of self-entitlement, which is what I think contributes to some of the biggest malfunctions in American society today. What always happens when I try to discuss these issues with the education professors at my school is that they say, "but research shows this [warm and fuzzy approach] is what works." I guess I should try to do a little studying on this matter of my own then. Today I read an interesting article by a group of professors (Lippmann, Bulanda, Wagenaar) at Miami University in the journal College Teaching (Fall 2009). The article was about how the sense of over-inflated and sometimes rude self-entitlement has thrust itself upward from elementary and secondary schools and on to college campuses. I think its interesting to note that college professors are now encountering the beast that the lower schools (and some parents) have created.

I guess I need to do more research, or no one's going to acknowledge what I'm saying might have merit.