failing better

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
--Samuel Beckett


I often wonder if instead of this increasing obsession with techniques of learning oriented towards spurious notions of success educators wouldn't do a much better job by also opening up a space for learning from failure.

It's amazing how, in these hard times of widespread unemployment and grim future prospects among the young, mainstream education can remain so aloof from and unresponsive to real life.

And a responsiveness to real life has nothing to do with preparing students to become mere cannon fodder at the service of fickle economic interests, market forces and political regimes.

It means, on the contrary, fostering character through an active tolerance of risk, uncertainty, ambiguity outside the pressures of professional utilitarianism and social conformism.

And isn't the study of literature and the arts the space where this negative capability can be more fully and actively cultivated?

Yet mainstream education continues along its suicidal path towards the marginalisation of the humanities in favour of S&T, as if they were mutually exclusive.

Sad indeed how certain civilisations choose to die a slow but inexorable death.