For Dennis Prager and his Parrots to discover the beginning of the self-esteem movement, they would have to travel back to the later nineteenth century when John Dewey discussed the importance of the self in his 1886 work, Psychology.

However, Prager’s Parrots would also learn that William James first used the term “self-esteem” with an explicit scientific definition in 1892.

A key task in socializing children, in James’s view, involved helping them gain the capacity to develop “self”.

The popularization of psychology and the growing notion that children often needed expert help brought concerns about self-esteem to greater attention during the 1920s and 1930s, and during the 1950s and 1960s the connection between self-esteem and supportive school program was fully forged.

Then in 1967, Stanley Coopersmith identified what he believed was a link between self-esteem and frailty, noting the “indications that in children domination, rejection, and severe punishment result in lowered self-esteem.”  Source: Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society on Self-Esteem

In addition, years before Vasconcellos chaired the Self-Esteem Task Force in California, there was Pastor Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral.

In 1982, Schuller published his 177-page hardcover Self Esteem: The New Reformation (four years before the California Task Force and eight years before Vasconcellos report was released).

From 1995 to 2000, Schuller also hosted a one-hour live coast-to-coast radio show, which gained popularity, and from 1976 to 2008, he was seen regularly on the Hour of Power and from 2006 through 2008 the Hour of Power had over 25 million viewers worldwide making it the number one watched religious show and him the most listened to orator in the world.”

The Impact of Church Growth on Self Esteem Movement by Je Gibson says, “Pastor Robert Schuller, founder of Crystal Cathedral, is often given credit as the pioneer of what has commonly been referred to as the Church Growth Movement.”

Continued on October 19, 2011 in The Conservative Talk-Show Scapegoat for the Self-Esteem Movement – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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