Schools should teach students to fail

Even mistakes have their function: to teach children how to deal with challenges and difficulties



You know how the school works: get good grades and all teachers will like you, you praise and cry all the time that you have a bright future. Now get bad grades or walk a little out of line. Automatically, you turn the mischief-makers in the class, the inattentive that will never be anyone in life.

Really?

Tony Little, education specialist and former director of one of the most famous private schools in the United Kingdom (Eton? Who has trained 19/1 ministers and members of the royal family) just thinks otherwise. According to him, students need to go through failure experiences at school to learn to rebuild in the most delicate situations in adult life

"Not only have the experience of failure, but to do so power in a safe environment, so that the experience can teach something," said the former director of the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, considered the Nobel of teachers.

That is, always be popular only get good grades and never suffer in school does not help anyone to grow real. Without having to deal with losses, they do not develop the ability to face difficulties. "They never had anything significant to fight," said Little.

Little's statement, in fact, has been scientifically proven. In 2014, an American study found that determination and willpower, at times of difficulty, help to face challenges.

Another experiment, this time from researchers from Singapore, divided 75 adolescents: the first group had regular classes with the speech of a teacher and ended with exercises; already the second had to solve in small groups and without much help from the teacher, much more complex problems. The second group, after many errors, receiving guidance from a teacher and, surprise: they had much better results than the other group.

The study concluded that, by failing, students activate a part of the brain that enables deeper learning. It's just that they need to organize and mentally analyze three things: what they already know the limitations of that knowledge and, most importantly, what they do not know. That is, err, and human, is much more effective in the learning process.