Are We Thinking Too Inferior of Ourselves?

636 Words3 Pages
Have you ever felt like you’re just never good enough for almost like, everything? If your answer is yes, then you’re definitely not alone. Recent survey, conducted by a local youth magazine, is designed to assess students’ self-esteem in terms of intellectual ability, happiness, anxiety and popularity. It shows that the self-esteem of local students is below international standards. Self-esteem is one’s respect for oneself, our overall opinion of ourselves. It shouldn’t be surprising for students to have problems in recognizing themselves since they’re still undergoing puberty, in which they’re still “discovering” themselves in a lot of ways. But why are our students having lower-than-normal self-esteem in particular when comparing to students of other countries? To begin with, I think we should first look into the problem in terms of intellectual ability. Intellectual ability is the ability to understand things and to think intelligently. It is often linked with students’ academic performance as it affects students’ ability to learn. It is not hard to understand why many local students don’t feel confident of their intellectual ability because of our current education system that strongly relies on students’ performance in examinations. There is nothing wrong about using examinations for assessing students understanding of the subjects, but it is just too easy to make students think that the only way to show their intellectual ability is by doing well in an examination. Then, if they don’t do well in it, they feel like they are failing. The side effects of this unhealthy practice are best reflected on my schoolmates. In my class like many other classes in Hong Kong, there are always some “cream of the crops” who get high, if not the highest marks in every test and examination. But how about the majority of us who are constantly stuck in the middle or at the
Open Document