Schools as Institutional Fail?

Karl Fisch once observed "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented yet, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet. " Yet, we continue to produce graduates at an alarming rate. As educators, we must ask the question: do we know what we're equipping our graduates to be? By not preparing our graduates for the changing fabric of the world they will inherit, is it possible that we are educating our students into obsolescence?

                                                                                                                                                                      

Reihan Salam, in an article that raises the very real question of an economy transformed by the current economic downturn and an increasing dissatisfaction with conventional education, paints a startling picture of the future:

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

One of the reasons why conventional schooling has failed to prepare our youth for the coming age is that schools are increasingly incapable of sustaining failure. Simply put, schools aren't a place to fail in anymore. Rather, they are places where one should "do well".

It is important to distinguish sincere attempts that fail from failures that are undistinguished save for the modest ambitions of their mediocrity. Spectacular failures have a remarkable ability to provide the impetus for spectacular successes. Mediocre failures are unremarkable in every respect, and should be treated with the disdain that Dante Alighieri showed for the lukewarm or tepid. 

Megan McArdle insists as much when she writes about the need to make it easier for people to fail, rather than making it impossible for anyone to try, as a possible solution for the global downturn.

"But after the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that has followed it...[the] freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix.That's a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it."

Students shouldn't go to school to do well. Our youth shouldn't go to school for "validation". We should go to school to learn something useful. Rather than make our educational institutions academic tightropes that our students have to walk in order to be deemed fit for civilized society, why don't we set our sights lower? Why can't schools be like the net that exists solely to catch those crazy, fearless, creative people who set out to conquer tightropes in the first place?

Nothing teaches success like the experience of failure. It's time schools rediscover that.