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[email protected] Analog on the World Wide Web http://www.analogsf.com Subscriptions to the print edition One Year $39.97 Call toll free 1-800-333-4561 Or mail your order to ANALOG PO Box 54027 Boulder CO 80322-4027 Editorial: A Time to Be Wrong On several occasions I've complained about a recent fad viewing the cultivation of “self-esteem” as a primary goal of education. The most important thing, we've been encouraged to believe, is that students should be made to feel good about themselves—whether they deserve to or not. Correcting their errors, or insisting that they correct them, does not make them feel good; therefore they should be spared such treatment by their teachers. The tangible results include such things as an epidemic of people who use and omit punctuation more or less at random, thereby destroying its function as a tool for precise communication. With that said, I would like to turn now to another educational problem I've observed, which may at first appear to contradict that one. It may be that in at least some cases problem “A,” just described, arose as a well-intentioned but misguided reaction to problem “B": a constant emphasis on evaluation that makes students afraid to take chances for fear they will be “marked wrong.” Now, at some point in the educational process—typically at the end of a block of material—there does need to be some form of evaluation. You can't claim to have taught something until the students demonstrate that they've learned it. If they haven't, you need to try again until they do. But that's at the end, when you would like to believe you've finished a unit. The problem I'm referring to is that so much of our education, at least when it's not obsessed with Self-Esteem at All Costs, has long tended to make students feel that they're always on trial. Teachers’ deeds, if