We’ve made learning too friendly.  Think about it- we’ve abandoned our red pens because they’re too “angry” and started using green and purple so as to not upset students when we have to correct them.  We are careful not to step on anyone’s toes and hurt their feelings by saving them the pain and anguish of ever having to know defeat and failure.  I say enough is enough- time to let them fail and fail with dignity.  Time to fail the way that I’ve failed over and over again and in the end become a stronger, better person for it.  Now, I’m not claiming to have had to walk to school barefooted in the snow uphill both ways with a warm potato in my pocket to keep me warm (having to then eat that cold potato for lunch and pray for a tailwind to help me return home faster in the afternoon), but I did have red pens , teachers’ criticism, and failing grades and I think I turned out just fine (minus a few little quirks and all!)  The catch is: we have to understand that a failure isn’t the end but the beginning of a teachable moment.

“From failure, you learn; from success, not so much.” Disney’s Meet the Robinsons

Our kids will play a video game for hours, trying to jump over the same cavern over and over again, missing each and every time, but they keep pushing forward looking for a new way to succeed after failing dozens of times.  At no point has their fragile little ego been damaged as their avatar has fallen to its virtual doom.  Our children are not scarred for life because it took them a dozen times to complete a puzzling stage.  We spend too much time being afraid of failure.  What we need to be doing is looking for new ways to help our kids learn from failure- not scold them for failure and not protect them from the lessons learned from failure.  We need to ask ourselves is it actually healthy to save our kids from failure and what is the real reason we are doing so?  Are we saving them from failing because we associate something negative with it?  Did we fail and then fail to learn from it and thus failed at failing?  Success and progress are part of the learning process just like failure and mistakes are.  We learn from our mistakes and our failures.  We may learn a million ways not to succeed, but if we had not failed we would never have learned the one way to prevail.

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Thomas Edison

Teaching our kids to fail is part of the learning process.  Our students may never remember the day World War I began or the monarchs involved in the War of the Roses.  The mundane facts that they can easily look up are pointless if they are unable to apply knowledge and to come to their own conclusions.  When our students leave our classrooms and our children move on to college, will professors still care about their fragile little egos?  Will the workforce modify their workload as to not hurt their feelings?  If we continue to protect our children from learning, what have we actually taught them?