Growing up, I recall my parents and teachers telling me when I made a mistake. If I misspelled a word or if I was acting foolishly, I was told and corrected. I failed often in many areas, but I learned from those mistakes and grew because of them. However, the importance of failing or being “wrong” seems to have changed in recent years. Instead of being told that we are mistaken, we are told that we still did our best when we most likely did not. Today, if a student is not learning at the same speed as the rest of the class, then the entire class is often reformatted in order to accommodate the few students who are putting forth less effort. But the freedom to fail is not an educational problem. The freedom to fail is a problem with the ideology of American culture that teaches students that there is no absolute truth, but that the only truth that matters is the truth that the individual makes for himself, causing him to grow up without a foundation upon which to build his greatness.
Michael Goodwin brings to our attention that many high school graduates who enter college still need basic math and reading skills because they were not failed when they did not succeed in those classes. But when there is no absolute standard by which to pass or fail these students, the opportunity to fail no longer exists. The American culture has removed this standard and put personal preferences and the inconsistent feelings in the place of failure and success by telling students of all ages that there are no absolute truths.
When the absolute standard by which we are to compare our actions to is set aside for our relative standards, students have nothing to build their lives and futures upon other than their own impulsive opinions and ever-changing desires. When we begin to build our own lives, the obstacles that we must overcome are far greater than we were told. Success and greatness begin to feel out of reach because we are not prepared adequately for the stress, the time, and the effort that must be put in to be successful. Many students enter into business, education, architecture, and many other careers and are struck with the reality that living without a standard is not possible. For example, if a student is interested in architecture or engineering, things such as mathematics, gravity, and inertia are not going to change for the student simply because he strongly believes that they should change for him. People try to tell us that our opinions are all that matter, but when we are cast into the world to live on our own, we look around and see that the world functions on absolutes. Making mistakes and failing are the foundations through which we grow and succeed in life, furthering ourselves towards greatness by the sweat of our brow.
If we are not allowed to fail, true success no longer becomes an option. Failure has been necessary for centuries to weed out those who are unfit for greatness, but the deeper problem of an absolute standard must first be dealt with in order to continue failing and learning from those failures. Without this absolute standard, we will be thrown into a world that has employers that yell at us for doing something incorrectly or late and we will not understand because we did the project when we wanted rather than when the project as actually due. We will be confused and scared because we are accustomed to living our lives in a world without absolute standards. When we begin to understand that failing, though difficult to endure, strengthens us to become great, we will be able to create and produce more than we ever dreamed.
