Education Bookcast

Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how they relate to learning. The Handbook starts off with five chapters on "The Self and Its Impact". I have previously covered a number of self-related concepts on the podcast, such as self-esteem, stereotype threat, self-affirmation theory, and self-compassion, but my conclusion was that raising self-esteem does nothing to help people academically or to improve their character, and in fact could lead to narcissism, which is now at epidemic levels following the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980's. H