The Power of Resilience
Implementing failure in education
Have you ever failed a test? Felt your face flush as your teacher hands you that paper with the letter ‘F’ circled at the top? It’s mortifying, to say the least. Our current education system uses this capital ‘F’ as a way to teach children — but what is it teaching them? That failure is a dead-end, must be avoided, and should be feared above all else. It’s teaching them that we must be perfect.
What if we could teach our children that failure is in fact a learning curve? More importantly, what if we could teach them that failure — re-framed as a learning curve — is an essential part of success? Ela Crain, published author, speaker, and coach works with individuals of all walks of life to debunk perfectionism and utilize failure to achieve excellence. Through workshops, writings, and discussions, Ela teaches that perfectionism is something we learn from our parents, our schools, and our society and yet is something we can change.
In the previous article of this series, Redefining Fear & Failure, Ela redefines our understanding of failure as a learning curve and details the ways in which our fear of failure is holding us back. Here, we delve further into education, examining failure as a useful tool for ourselves and our children to learn resilience and cope with the challenges of life.
Our current Western education system is a dinosaur, according to Ela. She even describes it as a monster, saying, “Today’s education system reminds me of Pink Floyd’s video for the song ‘Another Brick In The Wall’. It’s like, people being minced by the education system.” This powerful visual illustrates the ways in which we self-domesticate and self-regulate as a society — something that’s no longer necessary — creating plethora of perfectionists who balk at failure and lack essential life-skills.
Referencing Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens, Ela explains that the history of our education system is tied to the evolution of humans from wild animals to our current position at the top of the food chain. “We didn’t arrive at this level by tapping on other animals shoulders and saying, ‘Excuse me, may I?’,” Ela says. “No, it was really hard times of survival and violence.” The advantage that eventually set us apart from other animals was our ability to be social. “Like planning, organizing, working together. We had to domesticate ourselves to keep this togetherness. We couldn’t survive by tearing each other apart. So we had to come up with systems — belief systems or educational systems — to prevent us from destroying each other. But today, we’ve done it so much, so strictly, and for so long that it’s overdone.”
Education is how we instill societal values and morals into our children, where we give them tools to be adults, and prime them for success. “We are born unafraid. We are born with a warrior soul, but then we have to fit into society — which is fair enough, but again it’s about the degree — and it’s way off balance right now.”
“We domesticate our children until they learn how to domesticate themselves for the rest of their lives.”
However, we no longer need to police ourselves so strictly and domesticate the next generations so vigorously. Rather, our education system should foster resilience. This is a quality necessary for success: the ability to accept learning curves and bounce back. Because learning curves are an inevitable part of life, and yet we aren’t teaching ‘real-life’ lessons in schools. “We are producing followers and followers, but not enough leaders.” says Ela. “We are teaching a lot of abstract sciences, which is all good, but not enough topics that will help our lives directly. For instance, communication skills, negotiation skills, financial knowledge, and emotional health are all equally important subjects that should be taught in schools, thus cultivating resilience.”
Without resilience we can’t handle real life learning curves. We can’t bounce back. Ela describes this crippling reaction to failure: “If you internalize your attempts and take them personally, you’ll see yourself as a failure. Then you won’t have the motivation to actually try anything again. And this taking that personally part is very important because whatever we do, we take it as we are. So for example, if you do something stupid or say something stupid and then you may think, ‘Oh how stupid of me!’ But no, actually you’ve done something stupid, it doesn’t make you a stupid person. You’re more than that moment, more than a single action.”
But our current education system makes it incredibly difficult to encourage individuals to see their mistakes in a positive light. Failure is punished harshly. This leads to the avoidance of failure — to perfectionism — which leads to the inability to accept one’s missteps and mishaps — to a lack of resilience.
Today, several universities are taking a new look at failure as something to implement into the curriculum. Institutions such as Stanford, Cornell, Smith College, and Harvard, among others, have addressed the fear of failure in various ways. The New York Times recently published an article exploring the recent wave of programs attempting to destigmatize failure in academics, with examples such as “Failing Well” at Smith, “The Resilience Project” at Stanford, and the “Success-Failure Project” at Harvard. Perhaps the most shocking example was at Cornell, where after a large number of student suicides in 2010, the university committed itself to teaching its students life skills. These programs hope to make up for a lack of real life education — to teach failure as a tool for success rather than something to be crippled by.
As these universities have recognized, clearly something in our current education system isn’t working. From a young age, children are being ‘miced’ by the education system, and we need to start at the beginning to make a change. “There are a lot of private schools coming up that are not following the traditional rules.” Ela describes classes with mixed age groups and non-traditional subjects, such as ‘Land Management’ or ‘Origins of Life’ at the Green School in Bali, emphasizing that curriculum can be creative — using real life examples to learn not only abstract concepts but the process of experimentation. For example, “At Lumiar School in Brazil, founded by Ricardo Semler, they don’t teach just math or art,” Ela says. “They ask, ‘Would you like to build your own bike?’ And you’ll say ‘Yeah!’ ‘Well then there’s this number you’ll need to know: Pi, have you ever heard of it?’ Creative curiosity…that’s what is happening now, and it’s happening the right way.”
Ela suggests that rather than slowly reforming our current schools, we should work on creating entirely new systems. “The current education system is so corrupt that I wouldn’t know where to start fixing it, it’s all about creating new systems,” she elaborates. “There’s no point in fighting an eight-headed dragon because you can never win. You just go somewhere else and start something new in a free space. What you’ll start will replace the dysfunctional systems, slowly and gradually.”
Ela plans to jump into the fray herself and create a space for teens to learn practical life skills. “One of my dreams is to open and organize adventure retreats for teenagers where they can go camping, build shelters, and make fire out of nothing. They’d learn about emotional health and negotiation techniques, for example.” New workshops and creative learning spaces like these are crucial, according to Ela.
And this change in the education system should include the ‘failure’ label, we have created. “Can you think of a child drawing a picture — how could she fail?” Ela aks. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Failure must be re-labeled as a learning curve and re-incorporated into education.
Let’s create a space for children to play, grow, and learn without the pressure of our unrealistic expectations and societal judgement heavy on their shoulders. Children are already resilient.
This is the third article in a series exploring and debunking the myths of perfectionism with Ela Crain. How are you dealing with failure? Drop Ela a line to share your struggles and schedule a one-on-one session with her online.
Erika Clugston is a freelance writer and artist based in Berlin. With sass and pizazz, Erika writes about art, culture, and all things Berlin related. She has degrees in Fine Art and English from Southwestern University and is currently the Editorial Assistant for LOLA Magazine.
