Failure

Think back to your experiences in middle and high school. How many opportunities were you given to experiment and “fail” in solving a problem? How could a school work today where students were regularly offered such opportunities?

In middle school and high school, students are constantly assigned tasks in which we could experiment with and either succeed or fail at. These tasks mostly were ones with greater success rates than others, but it was up to the student to fail or to ‘not fail’. The problem with many of these tasks was that students have to succeed in order to succeed at school. There was no option for failure and even if the student started to slip, a teacher would be right there to help.

I think that if today, there were schools that regularly offered students these opportunities; the students would come out of school with a slightly greater education. It would be much more productive in a higher education but to prepare students for that, upper levels of high school could implement these programs too. It would teach students how to succeed for themselves and not just to get a good grade in a class. Student’s would probably take longer (more failures) before they adjusted to this system but if picked up upon, it could be very beneficial to students.