Don’t Look Down, Look Up

School systems around the world are constantly measuring our worth, and they do this by giving us grades and tracking our successes and failures. Our worth is often measured by our failures, and each of these failures is looked down upon. But why do people, especially schools, look down upon failure?

It’s human nature to have a fear of failure and to be crushed and embarrassed when failures occur. Our entire lives we have been in a school system that takes our failures and turns them into a bad thing. We’re taught that anything less than perfect isn’t good enough. I’m sure everyone can remember getting a poor grade on an assignment in elementary school and going home with disappointment. At least for me, in fourth grade, I was horrible at history, and I would bring home quizzes that I got a C on and would crumple the paper up and bury my shame deep in the trash can so my parents would never see it.

In the book The Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden, struggles with this very concept. There are multiple instances in which he buries the truth of his expulsion at Pencey Prep at the bottom of the trash. One example is while he is on a train on his way to Manhattan. He has a conversation with a woman and she asks about how school is going for him. He answers her question by saying ‘“Pencey? It’s not too bad. It’s not paradise or anything, but it’s as good as most schools. Some of the faculty are pretty conscientious.”’(Salinger 55). When she asks why he is already going home for winter vacation he simply answers by saying, “‘I have to have this operation… It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.”’(Salinger 58), rather than telling the truth of his failure at Pencey. The school looked down upon his failures, and in return, he was afraid to learn from them and admit to them. Pencey looked at Holden’s struggles in his education and rather than helping him be resilient, they punished him by kicking him out of the school. It was easier for the school to avoid the subject than it was for them to help Holden.

More and more people are failing school or dropping out, but school is also failing its students. Schools train students to be successful in one thing. Memorizing. Most schools and school subjects test students on their ability to memorize information. Every single test I have ever taken and succeeded at has been a direct result of studying and memorizing the information. If you didn’t pass a test, you failed and the reason for failure was most likely due to not having memorized the information. These failures are looked down upon because the students didn’t remember the things taught. Schools teach children to be book smart, not street smart. Students that are the most successful in school are successful due to their ability to remember information. Many of these students graduate and go into the real world with no common sense and no idea how to survive. They just know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and that force equals mass times acceleration. Megan Holstein stated that “Because schools only teach and assess the ability to memorize, students have no opportunity to exercise their intelligence outside of this. According to schools, the only way a student can be smart is if they can memorize well. Because this is how schools judge students, students learn to judge each other on this as well. They begin ranking their intelligence (and even their worth) by their ability to memorize.” As students become adults and grow out of adolescence, people judge them on their ability to survive, not their memorization skills. We are judged on our ability to get a job, pay the rent, and our ability to budget our money, not on whether or not we know what state is above Connecticut. Schools failed these students that just memorized facts, and the students are the ones looked down upon due to their failures after school.

Schools need to be able to identify the students that are passing or failing to determine whether or not they are ready to move on past childhood and highschool. The easiest way for them to do this is by determining failure. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Accuracy is essential to beauty. The very definition of the intellect is Aristotle’s: ‘that by which we know terms or boundaries.’ Give a boy accurate perceptions. Teach him the difference between the similar and the same. Make him call things by their right names. Pardon in him no blunder. Then he will give you solid satisfaction as long as he lives, It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge” This implies that schools teach students things that have a right answer or a right way to do it. In life right and wrong is not that simple. There is never a perfect answer. Schools teach the way they do because it’s easier to grade something that has a right answer. If there is a right answer, it’s easy to judge whether or not a student is succeeding. People and schools don’t know how to change this. There is no better way to judge success, therefore they don’t change their ways, and they continue to shun failures.

Whenever something didn’t go my way as a child, my grandpa sang us a short song which reads “I’m not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed, and the number of times I succeed are in direct proportion to the number of times I fail and keep trying.” When one is writing college essays, they don’t state all of their failures, they state their triumphs. This is because our worth isn’t and shouldn’t be measured by our failures, it’s measured by our triumphs, but in school, they measure our failures. How well you did on a test or presentation determines your success and worth.

Failure and unsuccessful moments are nothing to be ashamed of. Improvement would never occur if nothing ever went wrong. Our goal in life is to better ourselves and become the best version of ourselves that we can be. Rather than being ashamed of failing, we should turn it around and make it our successes.

People and schools look down upon failure without even realizing it. They don’t realize the effects it may have on students, they just focus on judging and grading others. They do this because it is simply easier. There is no way to measure one’s success without looking at failures. This is because there is opposition in all things. You can’t be successful if you have never failed or don’t know what failure is. Because they don’t realize that they are constantly looking for failures, schools don’t find ways to change. They don’t see that there is anything wrong with judging people’s failures, and if it seems as if everything runs smoothly, there would seem to be no reason to change things. If schools didn’t judge students on their failures, people wouldn’t be trained to run away from failure and they would take the opportunity that failure presents to us to change, learn and become better. Don’t look down upon failure, look up.