How School Teaches Us to be Afraid of Failure
And how sport teaches us to learn from it.
If you’re reading this you probably went to school and obviously, that’s great! In the many ways going to school is essential, but there's one big lesson that we should all forget - failing is bad!
How many times were you told that flunking an exam was terrible?
How did you feel before an exam? Nervous? Anxious? Afraid?
We can all relate to this but the question is, why?
From a young age, we are introduced to the rules of school and, in general, they stay constant throughout our formative journey. Remember rule #1?
Do not fail! You fail an exam, your marks go down. If that happens too often, you fail that subject. Fail too many of those, you're held back a year, and nobody wants that!
The result of this? Most of us are afraid to fail. How couldn’t we be?
School doesn’t encourage us to make mistakes and learn from them. It doesn’t give us positive feedback. It doesn’t teach us to seek knowledge, rather it drills into us that short term success is more important than long term gain.
As much as I and many of us may want to change the system and its archaic, outdated methods, that’s a massive undertaking that will only be accomplished with the aid of time.
You may be thinking — Okay, so what’s the solution?
Sports! That’s right, the universally loved and simultaneously hated human activity. But why?
Sport requires and encourages failure in its learning process.
Knowledge acquisition during physical activities is based on repetition, with it comes failure. With failure, lessons are learnt, adjustments are made and there’s a new attempt. This process is repeated countless times, eventually leading to a level of understanding that opens up space for creativity and innovation. The earlier this dynamic is understood the more likely we are to create healthy behaviours and reactions towards challenging situations.
“Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.” — Morihei Ueshiba
Failing in sports and physical activities isn’t free of consequences or even reprimand, but in a healthy environment, those consequences are minor and closer to real-life situations when compared to school.
School is education but education is not school.
I am not against school; I am for education, I am for knowledge, I am for failure.
In a world where preventable diseases keep increasing, child obesity rates are at an all-time high and sedentary behaviour is the norm; Depression is rampant, communication has become conflict and people feel disassociated from the world and each other. Engaging in sports and physical activity is not only essential for our health and well-being but also fundamental in our development as people from a young age.