Time to Re-Think
“Fail early, fail often” is the mantra of software developers. When writing code, the sooner a programmer discovers an error, the sooner he can correct it. Delaying production until perfection can be achieved guarantees a product that is obsolete by the time it reaches the market. But as I have discovered, learning to fail is hard. Think about your experiences in elementary school – no student raises his hand unless he is sure he knows the answer. We are socialized to believe that correct answers are what matter: tick the box, get a good grade, move along. And so it is a struggle to set aside what we have been socialized to do to accept failure for the gift that it is. But children of other cultures undergo a very different socialization process. Stefan told me that when he was in college and in graduate school, the engineering faculty assigned problems to students that they knew had not yet been solved. They evaluated the quality of the thinking and reasoning, not the correct answer. When I was in college, and I, too, was a science major, the faculty would award partial credit for showing your work, but the grade was dependent of a correct answer. Our educational institutions are becoming anachronisms of an age where students were socialized for post-graduate employment in large institutions. We need more creative thinkers and more risk takers. It is time to re-evaluate the lessons we teach our children. We are doing them a terrible disservice to impose upon them the educational system we inherited.