Failure 101

I think that most people in the US agree that our educational system is in the toilet. We are ranked worldwide anywhere from 15th to 25th (maybe lower depending on who you ask) among industrialized nations in terms of quality of public education. The reason for this varies among the people you ask. Some will tell you that it is quality of teachers while others will tell you that that it is school funding. Some will tell you that it is lack of good parenting, and still others will tell you that it is standardized curriculum that robs good teachers of their autonomy. Or maybe it’s “No Child Left Behind.”

Whatever the true root of the problem, I have not come to solve or even diagnose the problem. Instead, I have come to offer a suggestion. If they ever get around to fixing all of the things wrong with the educational system, they should include a new course of study to the curriculum: Failure.

Before you tell me that I have lost my mind, hear (read) me out. Failure is the single greatest teacher that mankind or any species on this earth has ever known. Think about it.

Here is a profound example for you skeptics out there. Experts will tell you that something like 75-90% of all of the learning that we do in life is done before the age of six. From birth to age six, we learn to walk, talk, run, use the bathroom, play with toys, use our imagination, fight, manipulate people, climb trees, ride bikes, throw balls, have pretend tea parties, and all manner of complex things that we can not easily explain or quantify. How long do think it would take a team of advanced computer programmers to program a computer to hold a real interactive conversation with a human being at the level of the average six year old?

If you notice, kids in this age range learn by failing. No one comes out of the womb knowing how to walk or talk. They spend a great deal of their time as they are learning to walk falling down – i.e. failing. Kids just don’t happen to know that they are failing. They keep on getting up until they get it right. After they achieve mastery, they move on to the next important thing like practicing their writing techniques (all over everything).

Most of the things and people that we hold in the highest esteem are predicated on failing. A major league baseball player with a career .300 batting average can make millions even though he fails 70% of the time. Edison failed hundreds of times before getting the light bulb right. Musicians spent thousands of hours honing their craft; many of those hours are spent playing wrong notes or rhythms.

These are classic and somewhat corny examples but they do make the point that failure teaches more thoroughly than anything else that anyone could invent.

Acknowledging failure as a teacher is the exact opposite of how our educational system indoctrinates us. We have spelling bees in which misspelling a word eliminates you from competition. If you make less that 60%, and in some cases 70%, on a test, you fail. Getting 90% or above connotes excellence, but does it really indicate that you learned anything.

We all know that kid that never studied and aced all of his/her tests with infuriating regularity. (I must admit that for most of my school life, I was that kid.) That kid really wasn’t learning. He or she was simply memorizing rote information and regurgitating it back in the form in which it was requested.

I propose that we should expose kids at an early age to tasks that are impossible to solve. Maybe we should give them puzzles with pieces missing or occasionally remove letter blocks on spelling day. Kids in elementary, middle, and high school should be given tasks that are several grade levels too high or impossible to complete to teach them that not all things in life have a readily available or pre-packaged solution.

How much better would our world be if people didn’t take failing at a given task to heart. When you can’t figure out why you can’t put together that cabinet you bought at Wal-Mart, you won’t rage for three hours until you figure out that they didn’t put all of the pieces in the box. How many Dick Cheney’s would be turned away from the dark side without the frustrating modern connotations of failure to corrupt them?

The greatest lesson that we could all learn from a class on failure is to learn to separate the act of failing from being a failure. Ultimately, we should learn that the difference between those two states is our level of perseverance and that our attitudes toward failure are a choice.