Lessons of failure - August 2005

I am old enough to remember summers when we could safely put our newspapers aside and take it easy as the few journalists who remained in half empty newsrooms scraped around for anything worthy of the next day’s edition.

Stories about eccentric vicars and talking dogs were the staple diet of what used to be called the silly season before international terrorism invaded the holiday months and forced us to confront the uncomfortable realities of a divided world.

Among the shootings, bombings, security scares and organised manhunts, however, a little bit of space survives for the lighter stories such as the macaw that has been removed from view at a wildlife centre for using four letter words in the presence of the mayor.

Then there was the debate at last week’s annual gathering of the National Association of Teachers to discuss a proposition by Liz Beattie, a retired teacher, to “delete the word ‘fail’ from the educational vocabulary to be replaced with the concept of ‘deferred success’”. Repeated failure in exams could damage pupils’ interest in learning, she argued.

Ruth Kelly, the education secretary gave the idea “nought out of 10” as might have been expected. “When young people grow up and enter the adult world they have to deal with success and failure,” she said.

Few would argue with that. Children must understand the difference between success and failure, no matter how you describe it. All the same I think Ms Beattie was on to something, accepting that she had been deliberately provocative in the way she had worded her resolution. We might never use the phrase “deferred success”, but what better way can there be to deal with failure?

It is one thing to fail and quite another to be branded a failure as a result. I remember at age 11 taking an exam that decided whether I would go to a state grammar school or to what was then called a secondary modern school. I had no idea of its importance. Yet, for someone born in to a working class family, to fail this exam was to have the door to academic achievement slammed shut in your face.

Such barriers would never stop entrepreneurs. They thrive on the challenge of breaking down doors. But how many children understand entrepreneurship? How many teachers understand it? The reality of the 11-plus exam for thousands of young children was that, no matter how skilled they might have been at other things, from that day onwards, if they did not perform well enough at this IQ test, they would find themselves set apart from the favoured few with little chance of redemption.

The comprehensive system that replaced grammar schools is still selective but streams children instead. Learning continues to be centred around traditional academic disciplines with little consideration of the practical needs of modern life. Few schoolchildren are taught to touch-type in order to use keyboards efficiently. Few are taught the principles of engineering or finance. In fact the student-loans for university help to foster the belief that debt is perfectly natural.

The result is that, despite their academic qualifications, too many young people enter the workforce ill-prepared in practical skills and with little appreciation for the excitement of building and running a business where the ability to learn from failure is a fundamental requirement.

A few weeks ago I found myself discussing with colleagues in the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, an idea to acknowledge failure among entrepreneurs with some kind of prize.

To fail in business is rarely regarded as unforgivable. Many business people view their failures as important lessons, showing them how they can get it right next time. The RSA meeting was considering ways to encourage entrepreneurs. The idea of “best failure” or best business, second time around, was centred on the notion that it is OK to fail sometimes if we learn from our mistakes. While no-one used the phrase, the whole idea was acknowledging that failure in business can be a form of deferred success and, in many cases, a formative experience that underpinned success in the future.

Every child encounters this lesson at school when they are told the story of the future Scottish king, Robert the Bruce, hiding in a cave after failing to beat the English in battle. He sees a spider struggling with its web and finds inspiration to carry on fighting.

In the same way, at some stage most children will encounter Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If. That this poem was voted the nation’s favourite is a sign of how deeply we feel about the need to deal with the emotional highs and lows of those “two impostors”, triumph and disaster. Indeed there is an argument that you need to fail occasionally in order to appreciate your success. As Truman Capote once put it: “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.”

It is not the concept of failure that needs to be drummed out of the education system, but the idea that failure is some kind of full stop. Children must learn to shrug off any hint of finality associated with failure. To fail a driving test, for example, is not to face a future without a car. It means, simply, that more practice is needed.

Those who have learned to deal with failure well, treat it as a form of inspiration to do better next time. For these people failure is nothing other than a set back. We don’t hear American presidents confessing that the space programme has failed when a shuttle is destroyed. Inquests are held, lessons are learned, and the programme moves on.

Whether it is acceptable to make a habit of failure, however, is debatable. Between 1962 and 1977, the British inventor, Arthur Paul Pedrick filed 162 patents, none of which was found to have any commercial application. These included mortarless brick walls, a new kind of wire mesh for tea strainers and a cat flap programmed to distinguish different shades of fur. Like the drawings of William Heath Robinson, Pedrick’s ideas were an exercise in the imagination.

The irony is that many workplaces are trying to re-establish such thinking, recognising that a lot of great ideas have emerged by challenging orthodoxy with something seemingly absurd.

Too often this kind of thinking is stifled in the classroom. Imagination is for the art class or the weekend essay. Instead, too many questions seek a single answer where any other is wrong.

Ms Beattie was right to seek a debate. The education system should introduce lessons in failure. It could start with teaching.