Fail2learn

=__MYTH: When you fail to learn, you learn to fail...__= This cutsey phrase has been around for many years. Shouted from the rooftops, whispered in the halls, used by teachers to scare their students, this supposed "truism" infers that if you do not make good grades in school and hence fail to learn, then you in turn will be a failure. But, is this really the case? Is it even possible to "fail to learn" or to "learn to fail" if you do it? Let's look further into this myth together....

Paradox: How can you fail to learn and still learn to fail at the same time??
So, the obvious problem with this myth is that it is //impossible// to not learn. We are always learning something. Even this truism touts that that even when you fail to learn, you are //still Iearning// i.e. learning to fail. So the fact that learning to fail constitutes as learning, then you are not actually failing to learn which in turn means that you are NOT learning to fail.

So, if we aren't learning to fail, and we are not failing to learn, just WHAT ARE we learning?
When we like to do something and we enjoy it, we tend to learn more quickly and easily. (Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly.1990) One of the reasons for this is because we understand and make connections with the situation and what we are doing. But when we are confronted with topics and situations we don't understand, we also learn very quickly but the things we learn are not necessarily the things we are //trying// to learn. Instead, we learn that //we don't like this activity, we aren't good at this (situation), this (situation) is too hard for us to comprehend, this (situation) is boring, etc etc.// Frank Smith writes about how the continual learning we are constantly involved in is not always beneficial to our lives. Not only do we learn things that are necessary to live and function in the world, we also learn that hinder our lives as well. (Smith, Frank. 1988) When we are not successful at an individual task or subject, we don't fail to learn, but we DO learn that we don't understand the topic, or are not comfortable with it and create a barrier for ourselves. Actually, we don't learn to fail but we are SO good at learning that just one encounter with a difficult task can lead to a lifetime attitude barrier that oftentimes is //never// unlearned nor forgotten.