Failure - a rant

What does it mean to succeed?  A brief, although none-too-comprehensive search for definitions gives us a succinct, "to attain a desired object or end", as if success is entirely based on an expected outcome.  Everything is standardized and ranked as your "level of success" or "percentile".  This fetish with ranking creates an even narrower sense of success as being better than x percentage of the population.  Anything less is unacceptable.  Anything less is a failure.

In our classes, we have been reading a lot about success, smartness, praise and character.  In the first chapter of Nurture Shock, the authors discuss smartness, praise and motivation.  Constant validation of one's smartness results in a decreased readiness to take risks.  The "cost of failure" is too much, so it's better to simply not try.  This book has been resonating with me.

I come from a family of perfectionists.  When you ask my mother if she ever got B's in school, her response is something along the lines of "no, why would I?".  The truth behind the statement is that she worked tremendously hard at getting A's because she valued it, but the implicit understanding is that only the best is good enough.  From our father, my siblings and I adopted a deeply emotional response to the world.  Anything that was not "perfect" was the worst possible failure.  As a result, we've all struggled with motivation and ambition.  If you're not going to be successful, why bother?  I have mellowed out on this over the years, but it is still a struggle.

After undergrad, I started working with children informally at a science museum in town.  One of the biggest frustrations I experienced on a daily life came not from the kids, but from the parents.  We set up 10 or 20 stations of fun, exciting, interactive activities designed to enthrall students and give them a sense that science is for them.  Nothing was graded or turned in (save for the few exceptions where the school handed out worksheets).  These programs were meant to encourage parental involvement in their students' learning and create that "spark" in a low-pressure environment.  While working a particular station, I frequently asked if a kid knew something.  Often, I would see their mother or father lean over and whisper something in their ear.  Dutifully, the answer would be quoted and the parents beamed.  They were so obsessed with their kids being right.

Technology furthers this obsession.  In our technology class today, one of the conversations was essentially about potential dangers of computers in the classroom.  A fellow student pointed out that in the middle of a discussion or debate in a bar, you can simply pull out your smartphone and suddenly you have the answer.  The conversation continued along these lines for a while.  In the classroom, it is now possible to simply "google" the answer.  We are so obsessed with having the right answer that, according to another intern, we are ashamed to admit that we might not know the capital of St. Lucia (Castries, I checked) or which power is currently controlling which island.

Why are we so obsessed with teaching our children that failure is the ultimate sin?  We need to change this narrative.  Shouldn't our children be learning how to deal with failure rather than simply avoid it?  This obsession with being right and having "the" answer leads us down dangerous paths.  When we never learn how to accept that we can't answer a question, we eventually stop asking and when we stop asking, we take one further step from humanity.