One of the things that they teach in just about any course that deals with life saving is empathy. I remember in my Bronze Cross and Medallion classes, the instructor would make us do empathy drills so that we could feel what it was like to be a drowning non-swimmer (pretty scary). In Engineering courses, failure analysis is something that is integral to understanding systems. That holds true for just about any field that creates systems. Except… of course for education. Why? I’m not sure, but it seems that right after I posted on Exams and Death, there were a few other posts around (think:lab,edublog post 1,2) that were talking about failure and after Rob’s comment on failure (clicky) and some time to think about things, it’s still kicking around in my head… why, in education, do we hate to have people fail?
One of the things that I was thinking that it had to do with is that it would reflect poorly on the instructor (for failing to teach… not on the student for failing to learn). Another idea is that because, even in post secondary, we have a conveyor belt mentality when it comes to students moving through courses, the more time they spend in courses, the more they cost institutions in time and resources and students have learned very well “just to hang on” and “get through” so that they don’t waste their own time in school. Yet another reason to avoid having to look at failure in education is that we think that it might be damaging… afterall, that is why we have social promotion in k-12 right?
After all this, what I think it might boil down to is that we as educators don’t like dealing with failure because of a strange amalgam of the above reasons and a few more. We don’t want to look at failure now in education because at the end of the day, even though we might know that failure/exploration is vitally important to learning, society demands knowledge transmission, not learning and the respect accorded to those in the educational sphere is already so low that we educators don’t want to get bit by the hands that feed us. Every other field out there has ways to see the result of their work within a short amount of time, but education, we have to wait so many years and even then, changes in educational practice may not identify themselves in the individuals that we “create”. We hope that we can transmit enough knowledge that our students can learn about failure “on the job”, armed with enough self esteem and ability to reflect based on the information that we have transmitted to them. We are in a society that want to see ROI and instant effects (we want to get there as fast as possible… think about how highways killed small towns), but teaching and learning are difficult, if not impossible to think about in those terms, especially when dealing with fundementals.
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