Failure is critically important for developing resilience, persistence, the ability to learn, humility, reasoning, analysis and mature behavior. I have learned more from failure than from ever doing something right.
As a manager, I created an environment that encouraged my employees to test ideas, practices, conventional wisdom and even my decisions. Th key was, if they made a mistake, it was their responsibility to fix it (within reason, of course). Most of the mistakes my employees made were fixable by them. It was my job to provide guidance so that they did not make career-ending errors.
We all make mistakes. Lots of them. It’s how learning works.
So it bothers me that school teaches the opposite. School rewards students for perfection and punishes student for making mistakes. Here’s a perfect example from my my Physics lab in high school and later my Chemistry lab in college:
In both lab courses, our equipment, testing materials and my own accuracy were subpar. When I ran the experiments as instructed, my results did not “prove” the correct outcome. The first time this happened, I earned a B or C on that week’s labs.
As a straight A student, I need to fix this. For the rest of the courses, I would study the upcoming week’s lab lesson in advance and work out mathematically what the results should be. I aced every weekly lab going forward, earning A’s in both courses.
Of course, as a result, I never learned how to measure chemicals in minute quantities. I never learned practical skills for testing wave theory, gradational acceleration or atomic principles. As it turns out, I never needed any of these skills in the real world, so not much was lost there.
More importantly, I did not learn that skill and competancy will only come after many failures.
Where did I learn that?
I learned it by joining the wrestling team in college and getting the crap beat out of me everyday for an entire season.
I learned it by making hundreds of thousands of cold calls and thousands of unsuccessful sales pitches over the course of my career.
I learned it by teaching myself in college how to study, after being the “smartest kid I ever knew” up until that point.
If I was teaching a class today, I would purposely design it so that my students had to fail repeatedly and figure out how to get better. I’d change the grading system to reward incremental improvement in their thinking, analysis and solution design over each attempt.
In the end, their grade in my course would irrelevant if they learned how to apply themselves, try things and learn from their experience.
I suppose that’s why most schools do not teach this way. even though that’s how every job and nearly every situation in real life works.