“The system teaches us that if you get ‘As’ across the board, you’ll be successful, and if you fail a course, you will be labelled as incompetent or hopeless.”
These are the words of Afraj Gill, a Queen’s University student whose piece entitled “An A+ Student Regrets his Grades” appeared in The Globe and Mail a few weeks ago. In his critique, he proposed that the shortcomings of our educational system are rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature of success and failure. On this point, I couldn’t agree more.
JANICE LIU/THE VARSITY
Recently, the question of how failure is conceived in our culture has been at the forefront of a range of discussions reaching far beyond the sphere of education. As we witness the increasingly fast pace of the world, fostering creativity and innovation is paramount. Though different challenges will emerge in different domains, one observation that seems common across the board is the adverse effects of stigmatizing failure.
The Harvard Business Review calls the stigmatization of failure “The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity.” This fear paralyzes our thinking by encouraging an aversion to taking risks. We are often taught the merits of trial and error on a theoretical basis, but rarely is such an approach actually implemented. Popularized phrases like, “you miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take” and, “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again” are globally repeated, but rarely are they internalized. Truth be told, we often consider failure shameful, embarrassing, and to be avoided at all costs.
At school, where passes and fails function as currency, how we conceive of and react to failure is particularly significant. In our education system, the positive role that failure plays in learning is massively underemphasized. We come to find truth by discovering falsehoods, and we see what works by finding out what doesn’t.
Academic success, however, is defined in terms of correctness, rather than learning. How can it be said that we’re encouraged to learn from our mistakes if, as at U of T, we often don’t even get our final exams returned?
Your GPA is an indication of your test scores, not of your originality, creativity, or drive. Last year, in seeking advice on whether or not to study abroad in France, I was explicitly advised against it. I was told that if I was even considering applying to law school, this was something I should forgo. Attending university in a country where you are less familiar with the language of instruction is risky, and if you aim at a competitive program, risky isn’t recommended.
Being afraid to fail places a definite limit on how much we are able to succeed. It’s clearly no coincidence that companies praised again and again for their innovation approach failure in a very different way. At both Google and Pixar, employees are given time in which to experiment, with complete freedom to fail.
In an episode of cbc’s The Current, New York Times columnist Alina Tuggend spoke of knowing an employer who would deliberately hire ‘B’ or ‘C’ students over ‘A’ students. Referring to ‘A’ students as “victims of excellence,” he explained that ‘B’ and ‘C’ students “knew what it was like to not always do well, and that that was okay and to try again next time.” Whether or not there’s any substance to his generalization is beside the point; what it serves to illustrate is that through a stigmatization of failure, we have come to misunderstand success.
When we talk about success, we usually mean to refer to end results — to some sort of finished product. But by what standard is success measured? If the standard is perfection, we seem doomed before we start, but characterizing success as anything less than perfection appears to be equally problematic. If there’s still room for improvement, how can we say that we were successful?
Characterizing success as a process solves the paradox. Success should be thought of as progress of perpetual amelioration. At Pixar, employees routinely group-edit each other’s work. In most corporations, peer evaluation tends to follow what is referred to as the “sandwich of praise,” where employees envelop — or hide — criticisms of their colleague’s work between expressions of praise. At Pixar, this has been replaced by a feedback technique called “plussing”. Plussing follows the model of “wouldn’t it be better if…” the general philosophy behind the technique being “who cares how good it was to begin with, if there’s a way we can make it better.” With this approach, success is collaborative and failure is bypassed.
In education, trying to foster a failure-positive environment is an especially difficult challenge. Though an appraisal of success should emphasize the importance of the process, achieving correct results remains important.
One possible approach is reform at the curriculum level. The University of Pennsylvania actually offers a course entitled Failure 101, where assignments require multiple phases of trial and error. This means that the final product must exemplify the process of having failed and learned from mistakes.
People have the tendency to think of failure as something inherently unpleasant. For example, studies have shown, for example, that you feel more negative if you lose $10 than positive if you find that amount. Many similar studies have concluded that failure is necessarily negative. This is misguided. Such an approach equivocates failure with loss, when the two are fundamentally different.
A failure is a loss only if it goes unaddressed and if it is not learned from. An education system that does not acknowledge the merits of having learned from a failure is one that will never achieve its full potential. Malcolm Forbes once said, “Failure is success if we learn from it” and he was absolutely right.
Phyllis Pearson is a philosphy student at Victoria College.
