A Hundred Cars

We’ve previously discussed the importance of providing ‘Failure culture’ when Invent to Learn says we should focus on Constructionist education. What makes more sense to you?

A few months ago, four-year-old James and Daddy were drawing cars together. They had just started, and each had drawn a car. James started to melt down. “My car is terrible!” he wailed. “It doesn’t look anything like Daddy’s car! I can’t draw cars!” James’s car looked great—for a four year old. It certainly was not a failure in any sense of the word. But to James, it felt like failure, because it didn’t look like Daddy’s. After some tears, we were able to convince him that Daddy has been drawing cars for years and years, and if he drew a hundred cars, then his hundredth car would FOR SURE look like Daddy’s. We even got him a special notebook just for drawing a hundred cars in. Reenergized, he got started right away, and was pleased to notice that even after four or five cars, they were starting to look better and better.

I think that failure culture and constructionist education are actually very similar concepts. Failure culture is based the idea that students these days are too afraid to fail, and consequently do not take risks or be creative. James was ready to cry and give up drawing because his cars didn’t look perfect. But kids need to learn that this is not a terrible thing—in fact, it is part of the learning and improving process.  Contructionist education is where students learn by doing; one important idea is that projects are always in a cycle of improvement iterations; when things don’t work, they are fixed. When things do work, they can be made even better. To me, these are very similar concepts, and I think Martinez and Stager’s criticism of failure culture is really a criticism of its name, not its spirit.

“Failure” probably isn’t the best word choice to describe the process of learning. No one really means true “failure” when discussing failure culture. Most often, mistakes aren’t failures at all—they are early iterations of success (learning). Or they are just how things are when you are a beginner at something. No matter what we call this, the underlying aim is the same: to teach kids that creating and improving is an ongoing process that lasts a lifetime. In a word, it is to build resilience.

James, of course, never drew a hundred cars. He lost interest soon afterward and went to do other things. That notebook is still there, in case he wants to keep going. But either way, I hope that he might have learned one small lesson that day in a lifetime of lessons, that helps him build resilience one obstacle at a time.