Comment by obscurette
5 hours ago
It's much more universal and complicated than that. One of the big issues schools and pedagogy in general struggle with is that our environment is far too safe in too many ways. For kids there is too few ways to learn from failures. Attempts to solve the issue look often like "Hey, kids, let's fall over now all at once in safest way possible and learn from it!". But it doesn't work at all. Real failures have to be unexpected, related to your decisions and really hurt so that you can learn from them.
PS. Btw, I am certain that this is the main cause of the mental health crisis amongst young people.
> One of the big issues schools and pedagogy in general struggle with is that our environment is far too safe in too many ways. For kids there is too few ways to learn from failures.
Its cause we already learned from our failures and make the world a safer place. In my youth we climbed on trees, one of my friend fall down broke his arm, the doctor couldn't fix it and he can not move the hand for the rest of his live. My friend would be happy do not been allowed to climb, or at least under safer conditions but have his hand moveable still. I burned myself really heavy with fireworks as teenager and have a huge scar from it. I never touched any firework after this but also never bought it for my kids, so they never had the chance to "learn" from making the the same mistake. Keep in mind that while claiming the world is too safe you say this from a perspective of an survivor.
No. I'm making a claim that the world is too safe from a perspective of my students. I see it very clearly that a lot of anxiety actually originates from fear. They are afraid to explore environment because they are not allowed to do it. They are afraid of conflicts because they are not allowed to learn to resolve these themselves. They are afraid of resolve any of their problems themselves because they are not allowed to discover the power to do it etc.
There's a fine line between "we made the world safer" and "we made the world too constricting to learn". I would like my kids to be allowed to fail a bit more often, while still staying safe. I think we've swung too far in the safe direction.
The difficult part is judging where that "happy medium" is. (And then how to get there.)
I agree with you. Kids aren't allowed to fail anymore. And as a parent, when I try to let my kid fail, I get scolded for being a bad parent. Broken bones used to be a right of passage for kids. Now it happens far less. While a broken bone sucks, it teaches you important lessons! Don't do that again, and hey, you messed up but you're fine now.
I feel like painfully falling without breaking bones are pretty good lessons already, and I don't quite see what the broken bones add there.
As someone who broke a wrist by rear-ending a car on my 100cc scooter I must respectfully disagree. A broken bone is way superior learning experience compared to some bruises.