Mistakes and Failure

I have to admit that I was taken aback by the assertion in Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering,and Engineering in the Classroom that we have a tendency of "fetishizing failure." My strongly held belief has always been that American society doesn't accept mistakes enough--and Martinez and Stager were telling me that we actually "fetishize" mistakes? 

A few years ago I read a book called Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson. This book taught me that not only do we not want to admit to mistakes, but that not doing so can cost lives. When we are unwilling to admit to small mistakes, it means we're unwilling to admit to big mistakes. When we can't admit to big mistakes, we often proceed when we should stop or ask for help. That's why it's important to encourage young students to acknowledge their errors. The book explains that not wanting to admit to mistakes is a result of cognitive dissonance. We grow up seeing that mistakes happen to people who are failures, and we don't see ourselves as failures. If we admit to a mistake, then, we are admitting to being a failure when we don't see ourselves as such. That's why it's important to teach young children that making a mistake does not make someone a bad person. In classrooms today, teachers may as well be called judges. 

While I don't agree with how Martinez and Stager present the topic of failure, I do agree with many of their points, including their position that "The current failure fetish is more sloganeering than progress" (Chapter 5). I talk often about how the power of mistakes, but when it comes to accepting the ones I make myself, I still have a lot of improvement to make. I'm sure this is a product of the learning environment in which right answers are good and wrong answers are bad. I also agree that teachers don't need to create situations for failure as a lesson. Errors and mistakes should come naturally in an environment in which students are free to experiment. By "fetishizing failure" Martinez and Stager don't mean that we shouldn't accept and mistakes, but that we go about them all wrong because we don't just let them happen naturally. 

Martinez and Stager explain that real mistakes are "self-correcting." When we are making something, in order to move forward we almost always have to correct our mistake. There's no time to be judged and lectured. Our mistakes become less like mistakes and more like steps in the process. I think that allowing children to make mistakes--genuinely--is in line with, not opposed to, constructionism which says that we gain knowledge from experience and that this experience is best when it produces something that can be shared. In fact, mistakes can be a shareable element from such experiences. Seymour Papert himself, in his Eight Ideas Behind the Constructionist Learning Lab, says that "You can't get it right without getting it wrong."