At the beginning of the 2005 film Batman Begins, young Bruce Wayne falls into a deep pit full of and breaks his arm. His father, Dr. Thomas Wayne, pulls Bruce out of the pit and tells him, “And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” When Bruce’s parents die, this quote becomes his motivation to become a symbol of terror for criminals, Batman. Bruce goes into exile and loses his company to bureaucrats, but he picks himself up, saves Gotham from the Legion of Shadow and returns Wayne Enterprises to its former glory.
If Bruce Wayne didn’t have the freedom to fail, he would probably continue to live off his parent’s trust fund and live the life of a typical billionaire playboy. His failure to avenge his parents’ death leads him on a personal quest to find out that justice must be tempered with compassion.
Failure is a pivotal part of the human experience. We touch the stove and find out that it’s hot. Thomas Edison attempted to create the light bulb 10,000 times and failed 10,000 different ways before inventing and patenting the incandescent light bulb. Like Mr. Goodwin said, a lack of failure signals the end of scientific and artistic advances.
In American public schools, failure has been removed to keep up graduation rates for government funding. For example, Virginia public schools do not have complete A/B/C/D/F grades until junior high. The grade ‘F’ is no longer describing as “failing” but merely “unsatisfactory.”
The purpose of grades is to show a student his or her weak points in a subject, and how he or she can remedy these weaknesses. But by caring more about self esteem than academic ability, public schools are doing a poor job of preparing students for college or the work force. In college, professors don’t chase students and beg for late assignments; they fail them. At a fast food restaurant, like McDonalds or Chick Fil A, if an employee shows up late for work or cannot handle the speed of the work, they are fired. I worked at Chick Fil A for three days because I couldn’t keep with the fast pace of the restaurant’s kitchen. My employer didn’t care about my self esteem, just making a certain amount of breaded chicken at a certain pace.
To better prepare students for the “real world”, they must be forced to repeat a class they fail or take a comparable class in the summer. By taking some of their “break” away, students will find out that failure has consequences, but they can learn from failure to work harder and strive for excellence. Teachers must remember that teenagers make mistakes and need to teach them not just for Advanced Placement tests and SOL but to learn from their mistakes. To solve any kind of problem, paint a great painting, write a great book, or make breakthroughs in science, one must be prepared to fail many times. Public schools must allow their students to fall and pick themselves up. That is the essence of he American dream.
Interesting...I like your observations.
ReplyDeleteThanks, my teacher thought I was "demeaning" to public schools. What do u think?
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