Successfully Deferred

So, yes, as expected, some thoughts about “deferred success“, or “failure”, as it used to be known. I thought I’d whittled on about this before now, but having done a search with the aid of El Googster, I can’t find owt, so maybe my brain and memory are playing tricks on me.

Anyway. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, we’ve been turning into a kind of nannied molly-coddled state where people- and particularly children- aren’t allowed to fail. There’s been a reduction in competitive events such as sports days, because in races (and sports in general) people win or lose. And that’s not on. Supposedly everyone should be seen as a success, even if they came last. They were successfully slowest, they achieved the distinction of the lowest score, they did well to let in so many goals, or drop the egg so many times off the spoon. Teams are discouraged, because, well, teams have leaders, don’t they? Someone who might just be (shudder to say it) better at something.

Exams are the same. We went from O-levels and CSEs, where CSE were a kind of “lower grade” to the infamous GCSE where (in theory at least) nothing was a failing grade. You had to work hard in order to fail a GCSE. Of course, employers didn’t give a shit about this piece of parsimonious happy-clappy hippie-arsed shite, and still maintained their stance of “Grade C or above”, as did further education. But even if Little Shaney got six G-grades, he’d still passed his GCSEs. (I should point out here that I did manage to fail a couple of GCSEs with an X-grade, which meant I hadn’t done the coursework. Go me.)

And yet, in this arena where people aren’t supposed to be perceived as failures (or, in fact, to perceive themselves as failures) schoolchildren now face more exams and tests than ever before. There’s a dichotomy there that I find hard to handle – two or three lots of SATs (an Americanism I hate, but we’ll gloss over that for now), League Tables, assessment exams, GCSEs and so on. So there’s the “testing” phase, but it’s tests that one isn’t supposed to pass or fail – it’s all degrees of success.

I’ve tried to find a quote I agree with in this concept, and I can’t find one. In fact, the only valid quote comes from another source, one disagreeing with the idea.

But others feel failure is as important for children as success – deferred or otherwise. “Everyone fails at some time in their lives and it is often in those circumstances that we learn the most,” said Nick Seaton of the Campaign for Real Education.

© Guardian Newspapers 2005

Motivation is a difficult subject – we all get motivated by different things. Personally, if I fail at something, I want to be able to do it better, and build on what I’ve already learned. I disagree with the person in the BBC story who says “But failing an exam – especially if it involves repeating an entire year – does demolish and make you start again.” Failing an exam doesn’t mean you forget all the stuff you were taught in the last year – it means that if you go back and do a re-take, you build from what you’ve learned already, and when you have that basic framework in place, you can build from it.

But you also learn more about yourself through failing. You learn how you feel, and whether you’re the kind of person who gives up, or who does try again. Of course, failing at skydiving is a bit different, but in general if someone fails first time around, they can try again.

Instead we seem to be developing a generation that only knows how to “succeed”, how to be mollycoddled and nursed, and never know about failure. How does that generation handle it, the first time they don’t get a job at interview, the first time they lose something, the first time they get called on getting something wrong? Failure is part of life, and it’s something that everyone needs to be able to cope with.

In that way, failure is perhaps something to be cherished, to be understood as a simple fact of life. We learn from those failures and mistakes. We try, we fail, we try again. And that’s the important thing – we learn to try again, to succeed through work, not through some mealy-mouthed politician who thinks everyone should be brilliant.