MARKS ARE NO JOKE IN India. According to the India Consumer Survey 2013, middle class households spend an average of 10 percent of their monthly income paying school fees and towards private tuitions to improve their children’s exam scores, with the objective of ensuring their admission into top-ranked universities, and lifetime success. This is true of parents universally — all of them want their children to succeed. Exams are considered a student’s horoscope of lifelong success. Therefore, failing an exam is a student’s worst nightmare, reflecting poorly on her family, school and teachers.
Consequently, schools, teachers and parents are engaged in a charade that ensures children sail through education institutions year after year without learning much about or ever experiencing failure. The dimensions of this charade are reflected in the landmark Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. S.16 of the Act explicitly states that “no child shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education”. But the problem with such smooth sailing through the education lifecycle is that later in life when children experience failure as adults — as is inevitable — it becomes a crushing burden which can break them because they’ve never known how to cope with failure, learn from it, and move forward.
To become a productive learning experience, failure does not have to occur in exams. For it to become a learning experience, it can occur in any structured format when solving a problem with an unclear solution, not unlike the promotional phase of a start-up business enterprise.
Eric Ries is a Boston (USA)-based entrepreneur and speaker at global seminars, advisor to numerous start-ups and venture capitalists, and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School, USA. In his book, The Lean Startup, he writes, “We are rehabilitating a concept I call validated learning. Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalisation or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method of demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which start-ups grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a start-up’s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning. It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.”
Imagine if we replaced the word “start-up” with “student”. The successfully executed plan that leads nowhere is what parents and students fear most — an educational roadmap well-conceptualised in theory, with anecdotal past successes and enough cushions and stopgap solutions to rule out failure — but leading nowhere. The inherent problem with such plans is that no plan is truly foolproof. The same lesson plan will not have an identical learning impact on 30 students. No recounted experience will identically influence a group of people. Unless we’re building a factory, it’s not natural to expect a lecture exposition or demonstration to equally impact all students in a classroom.
What’s missing in contemporary education systems is the opportunity for validated learning through testing individual assumptions about the world, experiencing what works and fails, with each student interpreting and developing common knowledge and received wisdom.
The “team” ries identifies in this process is indispensable for experiencing validated learning. Teachers, parents, administrators, siblings and counselors have important and ever changing roles to play. They constitute an army of people who support students when failure occurs. They will help them identify the turning point at which a failure has occurred when the student has validated or invalidated an assumption. After this, the student is ready to back up and try again. This is the point where the army must pivot back to challenging the student again, pushing her to make smarter assumptions and to revalidate them.
This is the best learning process, in which we take on real world issues on a daily basis. While exams are an important certifying process on the route to validation, we are not given written exams to validate assumptions for 80 percent of our lives. This process of learning pushes students to constantly revalidate their basic assumptions when confronted with failure, also making it possible for them to retrace their steps, identify turning points at which mistakes were made, and innovate new solutions that will lead to positive outcomes.
In short, the more we shield students from failure in school, the more we weaken their capability to practice innovation and initiate high-risk, high-reward enterprises that can change the world.
(An alumna of Carnegie Mellon University, Shabnam Aggarwal is founder-director of Perspectful Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd, a Delhi-based education consultancy)