“No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White house who has not suffered a major disappointment in life.”
(Bill Moyers)
Of all the dramatic experiences children and adolescent experience in schools, is their first encounter with an F on a school product they have submitted. The F becomes more onerous when accompanied with that look of sadness or contempt on the part of teacher handing out the F. From those early days in elementary school to university classrooms, students go to great lengths to avoid the F, most of which, dismiss the corrective goal of the F, and, instead, develop all manner of strategies to obfuscate the meaning or impact of the F.
I will not in this blog critique of the educational problems with the zero-sum game created by institutional grading policies. [1]What I will focus on is a broader look at the value of failure in learning and living life or to be it more succinctly: we must all fail in life to succeed in life. Strictly from a pedagogical stance, the feedback function, is integral to mastery of a subject, of an occupation, or of human experience. One does not learn from being right, but, from being wrong—assuming the feedback function is correctly practiced.
Putting aside failure as a pedagogical tool, as a human tool, those unacquainted with failure or have become skillful at rationalizing failure, develop a lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people. A thread that runs through all of our great leaders is how they came to terms with human fallibility. Lincoln, for example, was very open about the mistakes he made and the human cost of those mistakes. And, in admitting these mistakes, he followed up, by working to correct those mistakes, often by making dramatic changes to strategy or personnel. Lyndon Johnson on the other hand, had great difficulty admitting mistakes, and in fact, instead of changing course, he often doubled down on what had become clearly a big failure.
Last, but not least, failure is the source of all forms of innovation in our world. No part of our lived experience has not been touched by someone, somewhere, sometime, trying to figure out what went wrong with a failed idea, and, trying again to make that idea work. In the real world, we applaud those pioneers who never give up on an idea that has been branded with a F. In the world of schools, however, an F, terminates any further study of a topic, idea, or concept. Not only does an F terminate further learning, but, leaves a student wearing the the Scarlet Letter F until the next test.
[1] Joe Feldman in his book, Grading for Equity: Why it Matters, and How it Can Transform Schools and Classrooms, provides an extensive critique of institutional grading policies of schools and alternative grading policies that understand the proper function of feedback as both a learning and motivational tool.
Alan C. Jones 