The other “F-word”

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

There’s a dirty, four-letter word that begins with the letter “F” which people say all the time, but no one ever wants to hear. It fills the average person’s heart with fear, causing panic and night sweats, not to mention the occasional horrible nightmare.

What is this terrible word?

Fail. The word everyone fears, but no one ever wants to hear. The word which, when printed on a report card or any other document which people believe to be integral to the remainder of their lives, causes people in certain cultures or with specific mindsets to jump off buildings or to otherwise end their lives.

No one wants to hear about failure. We all want to believe that, somewhere in the realm of our lives, we have achieved something significant, and all of our hard work (or, in many cases, lack thereof) has not been in vain.

As a society, we are so obsessed with succeeding in life that we will do nearly anything to achieve the life we believe we have deserved, through some special qualities we were born with years ago. Success is in our blood, and we must be better than everyone in order to see our lives as a success.

It’s not enough to have great grades or a job with which we are happy or a family who loves us unconditionally. We must have the best grades, the highest-paying job and the family straight out of “Leave it to Beaver.”

As high school students, success was preached to us up one side and down the other. We had to do well in all our classes and on the ACTs and SATs in order to get into the best college possible so we could get a great education and go on to make lots of money as prestigious doctors and lawyers. Okay, maybe not so much the doctors and lawyers bit for everyone, but I come from a high school full of the children of doctors and lawyers, so the line of vocational succession was pretty clear for everyone.

But say you want to go on to be a college professor or go off and volunteer your time in third-world countries to help orphans and poor people, and you get laughed at and told you should think very carefully about your career choice. This does not necessarily come from the teachers, but it comes from many of the students.

My senior year in high school, I distinctly recall an acquaintance of mine, in talking about why she decided to go to college to study law, saying that she only wanted to be a lawyer so she could make lots of money. When she asked me what I wanted to be, she laughed snobbily and said, “Oh, I hope you like eating macaroni and cheese.”

Can’t anyone do anything for the fun of it anymore? Is it so bad that success is defined on a personal basis, instead of a nationwide, cookie-cutter definition of two cars, white picket fence, attractive spouse, two-point-five children and the corner-office job?

And why have we, as a society, become so obsessed with success that failure is the most horrid word for anyone to hear?

Failure is a necessity. We only learn from our mistakes, so if we are never allowed to make any or no one tells us when we make those mistakes, we will never improve. If we are constantly told that what we are doing is “great” and there are no improvements necessary, we will become a culture of mediocrity. We will all be successes because we “feel good about ourselves and what we’ve “achieved” and not from any true quantifiers of success.

No Child Left Behind has heralded the beginning of the era where “good enough” is okay. At least, that is, until a child gets out of junior high school. We must, according to NCLB, pass everyone at all costs. Forget the fact that we have high schoolers who can’t read or write at the most basic levels. As long as we give them that diploma, they can go on and get their high school diploma and spend the rest of their lives working at McDonald’s or WalMart, living on minimum wage and surviving from paycheck to paycheck.

What happened to wanting more for our children? What happened to not allowing every warm body that walks through the doors to pass out of them wearing the tassel and carrying the piece of paper?

Just because a child is born in America does not mean he or she possesses the abilities to pass even the lowest levels of schooling. The right to an education afforded to all American children does not, no matter how hard anyone tries, guarantee them the talents and smarts to pass through to the end of that compulsory education. However, we see that this is just what happens in public schools all over this nation. The talents and smarts I spoke of are being disregarded, and ignorant students are being passed through the grade levels simply to follow some arbitrary law in which we believe everyone should succeed at all costs. The result is generation after generation of students taught to be nothing, students taught to be happy with mediocrity in their peers but who are constantly preached to that excellence is the rule, not the exception.

Another wonderful way in which teachers in the schools of America are doing a disservice to this newest generation of children is by abolishing the use of the red pen in grading papers. Parents, and educators, have campaigned to get the red pen taken out of the pencil holders of teachers all over America, replacing it with the green pen. Seeing red ink on a report or math paper being handed back is, according to the proponents of the green pen, is “stressful” to a child. It creates an environment in which a child does not believe he or she is worthwhile and comes to believe, at a young age, that success is far out of reach, as they believe.

Do these people own stock in the green pen industry or something? Do they believe that their own educations were so terrible and horribly stressful that, once they finished school, seeing the color red anywhere else caused them to break out into hives?

Failure is a necessary part of life. We need not be so afraid of falling down on our proverbial rumps once in awhile that we constantly walk around with pillows strapped to ourselves. Falling down is necessary to picking ourselves up. If we are never allowed to fall, then we can never learn how to pick ourselves back up.

The American way was founded upon things such as hard work, achievement and wanting much better than what the generations before us were allowed to have.

If we are looking back at the generations before us and the “mistakes” they made, and the things we believe to be “wrong” are the use of red ink and the belief that not everyone in the world is cut out to achieve greatness in the academic realm, then we have very little to complain about. Too bad we’ve moved past the days where “educational advances” included putting computers in every classroom and making sure every student has a book on the desk.

Of course, these ideals have still not been achieved, thereby feeding into the inability of students to achieve the sometimes too lofty goals set out for them by legislators. But, if they’re not allowed to fail, even if they can’t read the material because they don’t have the book, they’ll still pass that particular grade level simply because the government says they have to.