I was writing last time about failure and education and I realize that I didn’t fully land my punch. If I could convince the country of any truth in hopes of turning around our issues, it would be that point. If we really, truly want the USA to get back on track….if we want the coming generation of young adults to fully appreciate what it takes for success….WE NEED MORE FAILURES!
I mentioned in the first blog post on this series on failures about my chance encounter with a US Army vet. He told me the best thing that ever happened to him came while in high school when he failed English. That failure, first taken in anger, led him to drop out of high school realizing that the life of the academic was not his forte. He joined the Army, as noted and spent 30 years learning about discipline and hard work. He now owns his own business and by all accounts is a very successful man.
Success came from failure.
Yet, we persist in this damaging belief that we somehow are helping students when we “protect them” from failure. We are not! Even my more liberal friends are seeing this, as I recounted a few weeks back when I noted that many of us were wondering why students did not seem to take the work serious, leading them to situations where they were going to do poorly in the class and wondered how I could save them. And of course I generally could not…nor can my peers. One of my more liberal friends pondered why such happens, what the student is thinking. I told him clearly that this issue of failure is the problem….for most of their lives (so, over the past 16-20 years), they have been protected in one way or another from failure.
And when failure looms large, some adult rides in to the rescue. Of course, it is clear to anyone with eyes why a young person would think thus. Look no farther than the GM debacle which our government, for some crazy reason, declared was “too big to fail.” The very idea! Preposterous. Sure, would people have suffered? Yes. But, is it too big to fail? No.
Failure would have been very healthy for the country.
Or, our students look around at the mortgage disaster since 2008 when everyone who overpaid, over-bought or perhaps were sold a bad bill of goods was left assuming that the government was going to ensure there was no failure for them. At the time, one of my friends from my church lamented that he felt that he was being saddled with a “stupid tax”—either he was taxed for others’ stupidity or he was the stupid one for still paying his mortgage. Either way the message was clear that no one should experience failure.
If we really want our students, our young adults, to understand how the world works, we must let them fail. Firstly, far too many students have bought the lie that a traditional college is what they need. This is the case that Charles Murray makes in his work…that there are various intelligences and academic intelligence is no better than any other such as musical or spatial intelligence. So, we end up with young adults believing the lie that you must have a College degree (and by “College degree” I do not mean the technical trades associated with an A.S. degree or certificate achieved at a trade school….those are laudable and wonderful careers to pursue, but they are not the traditional college experience based on learning academic concepts—-and of course this is part of our problem in that we are muddied the water to what words mean). To be clear, I support actively groups like SkillsUSA and in general, vocational education, for the wonderful job it does in preparing young adults for real jobs where their strengths can allow them to have a wonderful lifelong career. I’ve blogged about the need for the country to do better in supporting vocational education.
Many students, believing the lie, show up in college, often taking huge financial debts to attempt this path. They’ve been passed along through K-12 where many of them should have already experienced failure, perhaps a failure that truly clarifies what path they should be on. So, these poor students are now financially strapped in on a journey for which they are not only unprepared, but simply not equipped to succeed. They get into the few remaining “real college classes” and they finally taste failure. Instead of it being something that sparks them to discover what they should be doing, or that they must actually work hard to achieve their dreams….they instead look for the safety net that they’ve had along to this point in their lives.
Instead of having to stand on their own two feet, confront life, realize that failing provides learning and then making a conclusion as any other adult in history, they assume someone will save them. Didn’t the government save GM and didn’t all of my previous teachers save me?
Do we want more learning in our country? More success from our graduates? Then we need to accept more failure. Failure is good. Learning happens in failure.