Month: July 2005

The story says it all:

The word “fail” should be banned from use in British classrooms and replaced with the phrase “deferred success” to avoid demoralizing pupils, a group of teachers has proposed. Members of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) argue that telling pupils they have failed can put them off learning for life.

A spokesman for the group said it wanted to avoid labeling children. “We recognize that children do not necessarily achieve success first time,” he said.

“But I recognize that we can’t just strike a word from the dictionary,” he said.

The PAT said it would debate the proposal at a conference next week.

Amazing.

Can you hurt a child with words? Sure. Maliciously delivered words, and sometimes even thoughtless words, can have an effect on people.

But you can hurt kids, too, by being dishonest with them. Indeed, that’s an even greater hurt, because dishonesty breeds distrust. And distrust undermines any efforts to educate kids, including (or perhaps especially) efforts to make kids feel legitimately good about themselves.

Kids do fail at things. They should be encouraged to try again, but there’s a difference between acknowledging and learning from and being inspired by failure, and denying that the failure ever took place, that it was just a blip. Just a “deferred success.”

I can’t think of any better way for kids to never get to that “deferred” success than to deny that they have anything further to succeed at.

Britain’s Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, agrees.

“To be quite honest, I think it’s really important for young people to grow up with the ability to get on and achieve, but also to find out what failure is.

“When young people grow up and enter the adult world they have to deal with success and failure, and education is about creating well-rounded young people who can deal with these sorts of situations.”

That simplisme doesn’t sit well with Real Educators, of course.

Jean Gemmell, PAT general secretary, defended the ideas behind the motion and suggested that Ms Kelly was being too “simplistic”. She said it was “unhelpful” and “unfortunate” that Ms Kelly was commenting on a motion which had not even been debated yet, and was therefore not yet PAT policy.

“We are talking about young people who struggle to read, write and can’t relate to other people,” she said. “These are things you cannot be allowed to fail at.”

So Secretary Kelly shouldn’t comment on an undebated motion — eve though Ms. Gemmell clearly is willing to assert its truthfulness.

As to her final statement — it seems to me the way to keep kids from failing at reading, writing, and “relating to other people” is to focus on sound pedagogical techniques, not simply banish the concept of failing. Though I suppose it would make the teachers feel better about the job they’re doing if none of their kids ever fails, just defers success to some other grade level.

Maybe I’m just being unhelpful and simplistic, too.

(via DOF)