When I was young it seemed to me that older people worked at destroying the self-esteem of youngsters. I can recall several older women, grandmothers of some of my relatives, who took every opportunity to tell me that I was "no 'count," ugly, stupid, and would never amount to anything. When I was in school we were pressured to learn, and there was no effort to build up our self-esteem. When my children were youg there was a shift; efforts were made to improve self esteem regardless of actual performance. In games they quit keeping score, so there were no winners and losers (though I found that the kids actually did know the score even though it wasn't recorded. The country raised a generation who had a lot of self-esteem, even though there was no basis for it. Young people thought they were terrific at math, for example, when they actually were poor at it. Here is a discussion about self-esteem:

Another hit at the self esteem myth

The absurd idea that high self-esteem is a universal good thing (contrasting with the Christian message of the importance of humility) has already been extensively debunked (See e.g. here and here and here) but the study below offers some refinements. The comments about people with fragile self-esteem seem particularly apt. I have long identified preachers of Leftism as having high but fragile self esteem -- or "large but weak egos", as I usually put it.

There's a lot more on this at dissecting leftism.

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/