In the name of self-esteem and placid students, major institutions are failing to teach.

Everyone knows that American education is in deep trouble; the question is whether there's any hope. As a psychology professor for the past 17 years at a well-known New York-area university, I've had a front seat for the slide in student skills and motivation and - worst of all - curiosity. For too many, grades are more important than learning; even in my high school days, an "A" was often more cherished than the knowledge it signified.

The difference today is that grades don't need to be earned, and can be raised by blackmail. Last fall, two of my students didn't like theirs, and leaned on the administration to improve them. I objected to my department chair, documenting their poor performance throughout the semester, but he chose to solve the problem by forging my signature on the grade-change forms. I discovered this several weeks later, when, hearing nothing further from him, I called the registrar on a hunch. The C- student now had a B+ - and a lesson he will carry forever.

I was deeply shocked. Worse yet, I found that most of my colleagues around the country were not. They were sympathetic, sure, and surprised that an administrator would take such a stupid risk, but there was little outrage. Apparently, negotiating academic standards has become common practice. Besides, when tenure and advancement are so dependent on student ratings, it's safer to raise grades and dilute assignments than to fight the rising sludge of mediocrity.

Although none of their bosses had resorted to crime to placate a student, the professors all bemoaned their job shift from cultivating learners to pleasing consumers. Colleges keep cranking out mission statements that extol "excellence," but in practice too often it takes a back seat to retention.

This hypocrisy is abundantly clear in the trenches, but in the ivory tower they're still singing the old songs about higher education. Leland Miles, former president of two universities, is wistfully idealistic in Provoking Thought: What Colleges Should Do for Students (Phoenix Publishing, 170 pages, $30). Aside from "an open mind, a balanced view, and a sense of wonder," college should give its graduates compassion, insight, moral judgment and global perspective, introduce other indices of success besides money, and offer courses in friendship and marriage.

Miles is a free-range thinker - someone I'd love to have dinner with - but admits his ideas would require "a radical restructuring of the curriculum," an unlikely prospect since getting faculty to accept change "is like lifting an elephant."

Another solution is to focus more intensively on the Great Books. In Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education (Yale University Press, 271 pages, $26.95), Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus at Dartmouth, claims that this is the remedy for the "loss of point and loss of seriousness" in college today, offering his dichotomy between "Athens" (the mode of logic) and "Jerusalem" (spirituality) for analyzing classic works from Dostoevski to the Bible. The book is brilliant, but unlikely to help the student who can ask, as one of mine did, "Professor, are you going to say anything important tonight?"

Both proposals overlook two dismaying realities: a generation of students taught to believe that self-esteem is more important than real achievement, and administrators whose eyes are glued to the bottom line.

Miles and Hart are busy decorating a crumbling cake. So is Rachael Kessler, who targets younger students in The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection, Compassion, and Character at School (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 181 pages, $23.95).

Kessler provides instruction in "welcom[ing] soul into the classroom," including "sharing circles" during which teachers can deal with kids who have mood swings or feel lonely. Students' ability to read, write and think is secondary to their feeling good about themselves, which is precisely the philosophy that got us into this pickle in the first place.

In fact, Miles blames the lack of failure experience for the decline in curiosity, which he defines as "the willingness to learn despite the risk of embarrassment."

In the feel-good model that has dominated American education for the past 30 years, all efforts were equally worthy, and grading was either meaningless or eliminated altogether. This stunted students' ability to differentiate quality from sham, making them more vulnerable to every shiny come-on the world can throw at them.

And learners protected from honest judgment never learn to, as Miles says, "recognize, accept, understand and learn from mistakes," critical abilities in our fast-changing world."

With so little experience at surviving failure, they come to dread it.

Afraid to stretch and dare, many become passive and bored, doing just enough to get by and wheedling through when they haven't.

Finally noticing the educational disaster, America now wants a quick fix: standardized testing, beginning in grade 3 and recurring into high school.

Advocates insist that when everyone's held accountable for the same measurable learning, things will improve; adding the pressure of competition, with teacher and principal bonuses for good showings and public humiliation for bad ones, is supposed to spur greater effort and success.

But a curriculum loaded with practice tests and drills makes it even less likely that kids will develop any passion for learning, and penalizes them for thinking on their own. As it is, the student I quoted above was equating "important" information with what would be on the midterm. This is not education: It's the manufacture of puppets.

Peter Sacks underscores this in Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It (Perseus, 351 pages, $17.50), explaining how such testing rewards "irrelevant replication" and discourages understanding. When students learn information out of context just because it might appear on the next test, it compromises their ability to make connections and evaluate meaning.

Imposing a corporate model on education also makes schools vulnerable to number-tinkering for better results. There have already been several cheating scandals at the administrative level, but in this Enronian age, is anyone surprised? Back to my own nasty surprise. After months of anguish, I decided not to seek criminal or civil remedies for stealing my identity, even to effect something I abhor.

Informing the administration seemed the most direct and useful course; surely they'd be horrified. Well, they were, but more by the risk of publicity than by the act itself. They wanted to know my "demands" in exchange for my silence (I refused to sign anything). I did not "demand" that the forger be fired; that smelled too much like blackmail, and besides, if the university chose to keep him after learning about this and various other sneaky maneuvers, it was not where I wanted to be.

I simply asked for a reference letter from the Big Dean and said I wouldn't teach there so long as the forger kept his job. Last time I checked it was secure; he wasn't even disciplined.

Would it be any different elsewhere? I look around at a society full of shrugs and ethical compromise: corporate corruption, Vatican cover-ups, plagiarists getting Pulitzers, charities cheating, drug companies buying doctors and rigging clinical trials, the unashamed stealing of music from the Net. It was inevitable that the cultural emphasis on image, convenience and profits would leach into education.

But while I fear for our future, I'm not ready to go back into battle for the kind of careful, independent thinking that society no longer prizes, especially not without firm standards at my back. Teaching was my joy. Now it feels like pushing back sand.

Despite all our techno-ingenuity, "dumbth" continues to spread.  This is Steve Allen's term for the long-running epidemic of intellectual laziness and the official sanctioning of the slipshod.  National surveys keep reminding us how many students cannot read, write, or apply whatever concepts they do manage to retain. In 17 years of teaching college, I've witnessed a steady deterioration in academic skills and interest and a growing reliance on quilting: students scoop other peoples' ideas off the Web and stitch them into clumsy patchworks they mistake for term papers.  These kids cannot paraphrase what they just "wrote," but since they were taught to believe that effort is more valuable than comprehension, their first concern is how many pages it takes to get an A.  For many - not all, but more every year - learning is something that must be endured to get a credential, not pursued to enrich a life.

Much of the blame belongs to schools where sharing feelings is more important than learning to think: a philosophy sprung from The Wonder of Me 60s, it has produced a whole generation of kids with swollen, empty heads.

This was the spark for a scorching new book, "The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem" (Perseus Books, 320 pages $26.00).   Author Maureen Stout, assistant education professor at California State at Northridge, argues that self-esteem is a fuzzy concept that has never been proven to enhance academic performance.  "Everyone talks as if self- esteem means something," she says (p. 130), "yet where's the evidence?" (Another question: if self-esteem is inherently beneficial, why do sociopaths have so much of it?)  Proof was irrelevant to the 1989 California Task Force on Self-Esteem whose leader declared that "all the research in the world will not change my mind about [its importance]" (p. 255).  Their report had a lasting impact on public policy, including the 1996 Ebonics disaster that was scrapped a year later.  Stout indicts "feel-good education" for such intellectually destructive practices as social promotion, ungraded report cards, and the ascension of multiculturalism, which "places the learner's ethnic and linguistic identity at the center of the learning process"(p. 103).  It also created entitlement, the victim mentality, and alienation, which in turn undermines civility, which begets road rage, air rage, and ski rage.  (p. 218)

All of this makes sense and urgently needs to be said.  Once education deified self-esteem, it knocked academics into the mud, producing a generation that cannot differentiate thinking from feeling.  Stout's own research shows that a majority of recent education majors believe emotional intelligence (the ability to harmonize with other people) is more crucial for life success than intellectual intelligence.  Administrators have also been known to address image before substance: when two-thirds of New York State eighth-graders failed a new math test, the remedy was to lower the passing grade to 50 to improve the standings and protect the children's view of themselves.  In a system where each child fully expects to be celebrated simply for being himself, and where every idea, act, and person is precisely as worthy as any other, motivation becomes irrelevant - besides, to fully protect kids from the unspeakable horror of disappointment, they must be discouraged from reaching beyond their grasp.   Genuine self-esteem comes from meeting challenges, not eliminating them, but "feel-good education" spins a gooey cocoon from which failure - and its character-building aspects - are excluded.   Perhaps worst of all, students who lack adequate instruction in logic and deductive reasoning will be ill-equipped to detect sham and manipulation, becoming easy prey for any huckster with a shiny package and a snappy sound bite. If Stout occasionally goes overboard -  for example, blaming eminent psychologists for the posthumous distortion of their ideas - her fury can be forgiven as the panic of the last sentry at the last outpost of a losing war: after all, her students are future teachers.

In fact, her reactions seem positively breezy after reading some dispatches from the other side.  While it's generally better to like than to loathe oneself, the maintenance of self-esteem has been bloated into "the prime motivation for all behavior" - at least according to "100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom," by Harold Clive Wells and Jack Canfield (Allyn & Bacon, 290 pages, $36.00) which has required 30 printings since its arrival 23 years ago. Enhancement tips include having students write an autobiography of their hair and never grading them until they pass a course since "negative grades are primarily punitive - like fining someone $500 for being broke."  Other advocates warn that passing judgment on any behavior shows insufficient respect for individuality.

In "Self-Esteem: The Ultimate Program for Self-Help" (Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning, MJF Books, 272 pages, $7.98), readers are discouraged from criticizing speeding drivers and other dangerous people: "You may recoil from violence, but you must still recognize that the violent are making the best choice available (given their needs and awareness at the time)."

A stunning demonstration of how the self-esteem emphasis can corrupt education is provided in "A Life in School: What the teacher learned" (Perseus Books, 229 pages, $13.00).  Author Jane Tompkins climbed the academic ladder to an English professorship at Duke and then decided that she was "stunted and misshaped for life" by schools that "suppressed parts of herself."  The problem was actually closer to home, in her lonely, only-childhood, where her insomniac mother was always napping when she returned from school.  Tompkins turned to the classroom for emotional validation, making an intense investment that kept her terrified about making mistakes - "a humiliation I couldn't bear" – and created an adult who needed teaching to "guarantee my existence."  Pressing on despite heart palpitations and migraines, Tompkins achieves a Yale Ph.D. and develops a self-healing pedagogical style that compromises her students' chances for a similar credential.  Informing the registrar that "you cannot grade a person's soul" and claiming that books are less important than "getting the sunshine of love and attention from instructors," she puts camping trips into her curriculum because "you can't be intimidated in the same way by people you've slept in a room with."  When chastised for abandoning academic content, Tompkins replies "they get that from their other professors" and continues manipulating her students to satisfy her own needs for intimacy, approval, and play.  Somehow this utterly self-serving behavior got confused with innovation: Stout reports that Tompkins was honored as a "pioneer" at the 1998 convention of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

This is terrifying news.  And while Stout raises the alarm without mapping the exits, there is no ready escape from this cycle.  The "love and sunshine" curriculum has already done its work, denying basic life skills to millions of children.  It could also be argued that the expectation of feeling good all the time - and without having to work for it – has contributed to the growing national dependence on Prozac and Ritalin. Although charter schools are being marketed as the antidote, without overhauling current educational priorities they can only perpetuate the blunders of public institutions, with even less accountability.   At the same time, seven school shootings in two years have intensified the belief that emotional curricula, especially anger management, are more urgentlyrequired than science and grammar.  The only easy answer to Stout's question, "How can teachers teach if they're not educated themselves?" (p. 73) is to ban everyone under 35 from the podium.

But this is just as short-sighted as the philosophy that brought us here. It's time to think the problem through - while there are still people around who can.