Can Failure Be An Option?

There is an old saying that goes “try and try until you succeed”. The underlying message is that you would have to fail before you succeed because by failing, you learn what you need to do in order to be successful. Many people have gone through that, and it does not matter that they failed; what matters is that they rose to their feet and tried again. Failing is a learning process. Who would think of taking that away? It seems unrealistic that failure would disappear and everyone would succeed. Believe it or not, that concept is slowly becoming a reality, and, of all places, it is starting in our schools.

In a video posted online called “Freedom to Fail” discussing an essay he wrote in the book New Threats to Freedom, Michael Goodwin mentions that our education is in crisis, and the reason for that crisis is something called Social Promotion. What it does is it lowers the standards of passing so that students can do very little and still pass. In other words, no one would fail because the tests and homework are brought to the “Easy” level. Students would think everything is easy. It never prepares students for the real world.

In the 2008-2009 school year, my school introduced something called the Minimum F Policy. No student could ever get a score lower than 50% with that policy in effect. For students who had a hard time getting good grades, the policy was a lifesaver. For students who put 100% of their effort to their work, the policy was unfair. It was a discouraging policy for both types of students at my school. Those who normally did not like to do work did not do work because they knew they would still pass. The mindset of those who usually put effort into their work changed to “if they are passing by doing nothing, then why do I have to work hard to pass?”

I tried to avoid the trap of the policy. I stayed up all night to do my research papers, memorized vocabulary words, and read. When I got to school the next day, there would only be a handful of us who actually did work, but the whole class passed. Students took advantage of the policy to be at the same level as the hard workers. Social promotion makes it hard to identify the “hard workers” from the “hardly working”. With social promotion, “nobody rises above” (Goodwin) and it becomes almost like language inflation: if “good” is used to describe everyone all the time, those who do more than “good” is never “better”.

We need to get out of our comfort zone and see for ourselves if we can succeed without relying on social promotion or anything of the same concept. We cannot expect for something or other people to pave the road to success for us. They say failure is not an option, but if success results from failure, would you mind failing first?