A school is a place where kids make great memories but also learn many important lessons about life, many of which aren’t taught in classrooms but are learned through interactions with our teachers and our peers. One of the biggest lessons you will learn while being in school is that you will fail sometimes. Even then, the fear of failure still remains and for many kids at school, it can be a brutal experience. I myself remember failing a very important Social Studies Test in my IB class, the second time, and I quickly went into the washroom and started crying. I was there for an hour. I only went back to class when there were twenty minutes left for that class to end. But the feeling that I was never bound to succeed in Social Studies class was still there consuming my thoughts. It made me more anxious for upcoming tests than I already was. That is what failure does; it makes our goals seem less attainable.
We all want to be the best version of ourselves. We want to succeed. And sometimes, a lot of us do that to prove to people that we are capable of being smart, strong, talented. Sometimes for kids, it’s to do it out of parental/family pressures. We then push ourselves to be near-perfect in everything we do, telling ourselves that failure is not an option. But failure is right around the corner, and as it arrives, it can be ever so disheartening. This begs the question, how can we encourage today’s youth to get back up when they get knocked down?
A school in Northampton, Massachusetts, called Smith College has opened up a program as part of an initiative called “Failing Well.” In the program, students and staff share stories of their biggest academic failures, from failing their first college writing exam to having a poem rejected by 21 journals. The program also includes workshops on perfectionism, Imposter Syndrome, Overthinking and Self-promotion. According to an article from the Washington Post, Rachel Simmons, a leadership development specialist in Smith’s Wurtele Center for Work and Life, said that the program is designed to teach that “failure is not a bug of learning, it’s the feature.”
Upon entering the program, students are given a “Certificate of Failure” that certifies them to “screw up, bomb, or otherwise fail at one or more relationships, hookups, friendships, email or texts, papers, exams, class, extracurricular activities, or any other choices and decisions associated with college herein, wherefore, and forevermore… and still be a totally worthy, utterly excellent human being.”
Similar programs and projects have been opened up in Harvard, Stanford, and Penn-State University, all to achieve the same goal: to open up a conversation about personal academic and social failures during school in order to create resilience among students after experiencing a setback.
The same kind of approach should be taken in Canadian high schools, and colleges. It is a fact that the anxiety and depression levels in students today are higher than ever before, and bringing this approach into our education system will play a part in the solution of this problem, and letting Canadian youth know, that it is okay to fail, and that they’re never the only ones.