Failure to Fail

My 10^th grade daughter has more homework each night than I had each week when I went to high school. It is astounding; she is up until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning doing homework. She is not a procrastinator or busy multitasking on Facebook and Instagram. She may get a late start because she runs cross-country, but I don’t think she starts her homework any later than most 10^th graders.

The state of education in this country and maybe other developed countries is simply abysmal. I am not an expert on education, and in all fairness I have never attended a PTA meeting in my life. What I can tell you is that schools are failing to really educate our children. Schools do a really good job of giving homework and preparing students for standardized test, but are we educating our children?

In a recent New Yorker article on this subject, Nathan Heller writes about whether elite colleges are “bad for the soul.” Much of the article is about William Deresiewicz and his essay in the American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” and book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

According to Deresiewicz, the system “manufacturers students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea of why they’re doing it.”

Why are we still having students memorize facts instead of teaching what they really mean or don’t mean? My daughter is asked to read the front page of the New York Times every day and then quizzed on random facts. Wouldn’t it be better to discuss the front page and ask students what they think of a story or have a discussion about how they’re dealing with the stories about ISIS or Ebola?

I constantly see T-shirts or bumper stickers advertising the importance of failing, getting up, dusting yourself off, and trying again. But are we really teaching our children this approach to life? If they are only focused on their grades and knowing what they are supposed to know, are they learning the importance of failing, figuring out what it might take to find a different way, and then trying again (and again)?

If we really believe in the importance of failing, then we have to encourage our kids to be okay with failure, to take risks and experience a full range of outcomes, both good and bad.

This idea of learning through tests has crossed over into college. This is a time in young adults’ lives when they should be exploring every opportunity. Deresiewicz writes, “The job of college is to assist you, or force you, to start your way through the vale of soul-making. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways: all of these are incitements, disruptions, violations. They make you question everything you thought you knew about yourself.”

We are truly failing our children if we don’t start letting them know it’s okay not to get an A if it means they are really engaging with what they’re learning. If they’re studying in order to get an A but fail to really know, feel, or understand the material at hand, it’s not an A. It means they are robots.