The Success of Failure

The Success of Failure

I recently saw the video Michael Goodwin on the loss of the freedom to fail, which is a response to the aptly named “New Threats To Freedom” series. When we think of threats to freedom we immediately imagine domestic or international terrorism, Communism, and/or Nuclear war. It’s due to this narrow minded, but widely accepted, view of the threats to freedom, that I believe Constitutional and Academic sabotage has been so successful. The enemy within if you will.

Despite teachings of the contrary, our Constitution is not vague on what areas the government should or should not control. This includes schools and education. Michael Goodwin’s video cites specifically automatic promotion and schools inability to show failure to their students, for the sake of their “self-esteem” as a form of a threat to our freedom. This is based on the concept that Freedom allows for great success, but great success must allow for great failure. Great failure has lead to the greatest exceptionalism and inventions in our worlds history. Academia’s irrational fear of failure has lead to poor work ethics, students who graduate ill-equipped for the real world, failed lives and low self-worth. Despite their good intentions, our society’s obsession with “self-esteem” actually injures our students future by ignoring an individuals need for pride, success, and self-worth, none of which is gained when only the collective is favored. With experiments like automatic promotion or not using grades, the individual is ignored for the good of the many.

This “fear of failure” has even seeped into our school sports and extracurricular activities. In the name of self-esteem, all team members are given trophy’s just for showing up. We no longer award individuals talents or achievements, or a teams ability to work together and become exceptional.

Having poorly educated and ignorant citizens leads to less exceptionalism and entrapanuership. When people fear failure to the point where they are unwilling to risk it, they unwittingly ensure that they will never succeed beyond the basic necessities of life, if that. And this in turn leads to citizens more and more dependent on the Federal Government, which does not judge on an individuals personal goals or wants or abilities, but a collective value system based solely on yearly income, number of dependents, and inability to work. Our citizens become slaves to the government, relying only on them the provide and living in terror that that safety net will be disassembled. By teaching our children that failure is the worst that can happen to you, we now have a society that believes it’s government MUST provide, or people will die in the streets, unable to provide for themselves. And therefore, our freedom no longer belongs to us, but is doles out at the discretion of the government, based on it’s owns desires and whims, rather than the idea that all people, in a free society, have equal opportunity, not equal results.

In summation, exceptionalism has given way to mediocrity, and American society seems to be content with that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJLCbv5K0WU