The notion that failure is good for you is trendy, writes our Student Council member Julia Huebner:
Failure in schools is the new project-based learning: it’s glittery and innovative — and very elite. Describing a failure (and what you learned from it) can be a ticket to a prestigious university. Stories of failure have to be important enough to be impactful, but of course not dire enough to actually affect college admissions prospects.
She asks — apologizing for how “college-y” it sounds — Do you think failure is important to success? When have you failed, and who did you fail?
If you could go back and do it again, would you correct your mistake before you made it?
In “The Art of Failing Upward, Kate Losse writes:
In the start-up world, failure is in. No sooner has an entrepreneur failed at a venture in Silicon Valley than he takes to the web — frequently to blogging sites like Medium, which hosts a continuous stream of essays on the topic — or to the stage at industry conferences like FailCon to narrate the failure and the growth he experienced as a result.
Telling the story of what went wrong is a way to wring insight from failure, but it’s also a way of proclaiming membership in a community of innovators who are unafraid of taking risks. Tech workers now use terms like “soft landing” (to fail gently without career harm) and “failing upward” (to fail with an immediate career upside).
Thanks, in part, to a playlist of TED talks on the productivity of failure, the dictum to “fail harder, fail faster” is now being peddled in fields from scientific research to elementary education. Consider recently published books like Stuart Firestein’s “Failure: Why Science Is So Successful” and Jessica Lahey’s “The Gift of Failure,” which argues that children today occupy such risk-scrubbed environments that opportunities for failure must be manufactured. At AltSchool, in Silicon Valley, where pre-K tuition is $27,000 a year, modeling failure is a part of the curriculum.
What is not being mentioned in the marketing of failure is that not everyone can, shall we say, fail successfully.
… It is the “failure-deprived Stanford and Harvard students,” as Ms. Lahey’s book calls them — particularly white men with connections to capital — who are best equipped to fail successfully. For these elites, failure becomes not so much a crisis as a modern-day finishing school, where everyone graduates with the perfect résumé of mettle-building career challenges.
Buzz Andersen, a software developer who was an early employee at Tumblr and Square, thinks this limited culture of forgiveness encourages homogeneity, not growth. “It promotes a culture of once you’re in, you’re in, no matter how badly you’ve run your last venture into the ground,” he said.
Students: Read the entire article, then answer the questions below:
— Do you agree with the idea mentioned here, from Jessica Lahey’s book “The Gift of Failure,” that many children today occupy “risk-scrubbed environments”? Do you wish your parents would let you fail more often? Why or why not? Do you think a little failure might be good for you?
— How do your teachers talk about and treat failures of various kinds? Do they allow you to learn from them? Does your school feel more like a place where risk-taking is encouraged, or discouraged? Why?
— When have you failed? Did you “fail successfully” by learning something valuable, or do you wish that you could go back and change what happened?
— What do you think about this article’s argument that the ability to fail successfully is a result, in part, of privilege? (As one person puts it, “If you ‘fail fast’ and you don’t have the right demographics, the right safety net, you just fail.”)
Related Lesson Plan | Sowing Failure, Reaping Success: What Failure Can Teach
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