What Do We Learn When We Make Mistakes?

Mistakes, Slowness and Self-Confidence

A philosophy workshop with children aged 9 to 11 on the importance of making mistakes. In fashionable educational discourse, it is customary to say that making mistakes doesn’t matter. The problem is that there is often a gap between words and deeds. On the one hand, teachers often say that knowing how to make mistakes is important; on the other, the school system — and very often parents too — keep drawing attention to results. So when we say “making mistakes doesn’t matter”, it is clear we don’t really believe it: we say it to reassure ourselves, but deep down we are very anxious about our mistakes.

In the workshop I led yesterday in the little school of Lajoux, a village in the Haut-Jura mountains, I therefore try to untangle this problem with the children. Sometimes, in a class, some children reach the right answer very quickly, while others struggle and get there only with great difficulty.

— So which is better: to be in the place of the child who succeeds quickly, or of the one who struggles?

— It’s better to be the child who succeeds quickly, answers Léa promptly; she is a good student.

— Why?

— Because they’ll be rewarded quickly and that will give them self-confidence, she explains.

— But then, if what counts is getting the right answer, can we cheat too?

— No, because success is only good if you’ve made an effort, says Ali. If you succeed because you cheated, you may get a good mark, but you don’t really have confidence in yourself.

— Why?

— Because another time, when it’s difficult, you won’t know how to do it — you won’t have confidence.

— So in the end, to have self-confidence, is it better to succeed quickly or slowly?

The children are divided, so we continue the discussion. Some think that in the end it is better to succeed slowly and with effort, because for someone who succeeds too quickly it is a bit like cheating, only less serious: sometimes you stumble on the right answer, but it is just luck. Sometimes it is also because you are gifted — but the drawback of being gifted is that you don’t really take the time to build confidence in yourself. The gifted person hasn’t learned to measure their strengths, to know what they went through to get there. This is sometimes the problem of the good student who, in the end, doubts themselves a lot: they succeed without really knowing why. And then, when a failure comes, they are lost.

Climbing back into the Philomobile, I think about our little discussion with the children. It seems to me that life is much the same: if we succeed very quickly and very well, our self-confidence is too superficial. When we have been through failures and taken the time to overcome them, to look at them without panicking or dramatizing, we become far more solid.