Recent stories from NPR and Huffington Post have called to mind some things that I believe were formative in my life and representative of my generations’ experience with education. Often, children born in the 80’s and beyond have been critiqued as being “lazy” and “weak;” too prone to “instant gratification” and needing “constant encouragement.” As an educator, I see increasing insecurity in students and acknowledge its birth in my generation. The question is: if we see it getting worse, why aren’t we doing anything about it?

To illustrate my point, I’d like to tell three stories from my own past. The first was a parent-teacher conference that happened when I was in the third grade. I distinctly remember the sights, sounds, and smells of the classroom as my parents, teacher, and I gathered around the table. My teacher had some specific concerns about my academic performance in math. I was quite competent in other content areas, but my math grades were not as outstanding as my other achievements and my teacher felt they deserved some additional attention from my parents. From that moment on, I accepted the fact that I was “bad at math,” a label that I carry into adulthood. I realized at this moment that there was a “right” way to do things. 2+2=4. There was linear logic to math. It didn’t make sense to me. So I was “wrong.” This followed me through fractions, long division, algebra, and geometry. In fact, I had to take a math course 3 times in college before I found one that I could pass.

Fast forward to my first years as a choir teacher. Despite my poor math performance, I have enjoyed a successful academic career. Graduating from high school at the top of my class, I attended outstanding colleges for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and was ready to embark on a successful career in teaching. Luckily, there wouldn’t be much math in my new profession. I had found ways to live a life where I could be “right,” at least in my mind. I had always been among the “best” in music, so I was excited to prove my worth.

Of course, as is often the case, the real world doesn’t reflect what we learn in school. Faced with the normal challenges of teaching human beings who were not entirely within my control, my first several years of teaching were a struggle. I felt that there was a “right” way to do things, and set about perfecting it in my little world. The first year I took choirs to the annual assessment, I longed for the validation that what my choirs and I were doing was “right.” I hoped that we would be among the “best.”

This was not what happened. I listen back on recordings from my first years teaching and hear choirs that were trying really hard. I had instilled in them a desire to be the best, as I think most teachers do in our current system. Sadly, we did not live up to the expectations for such a standard. I still remember being taken aside by the judges of that first contest after it was over. I’m sure they wanted to offer advice that would help me grow as a teacher and help my student’s succeed. All I heard from them was, “You were not the best. You were not right. This is what’s right. You were wrong.”

I would spend the next 3 years seeking out the advice of people in my field who I felt were the best. I would send recordings, literature selections, teaching techniques to them. I would spend hours listening to their advice. All the while, these well-intentioned mentors told me how they felt I could improve and the “best plan of action.” With each passing day, however, I came to realize that I was not the best. My conclusion then was, “since I’m not the best, I must be the worst.” I wandered through those days, disillusioned, and feeling like a failure. My students suffered from my insecure teaching.

The worldview that I present isn’t unique to my experience. Many people my age and younger can resonate with similar stories in their lives. From the first failed job interview to the first bad date, we all seek validation on what is “right” and many of us assume that failure must mean that we are “wrong.”

This perspective on this world is born out of what Ferdinand de Saussure, Jaques Lacan, and Claude Levi-Strauss would come to tern Structuralism. My armchair philosopher’s view of this is that, as people became aware of an increasingly complex and chaotic world in the face of World Wars and global economies, they sought out a way to create order. Looking to the past, they began to categorize things as either/or. The further down this path you go, you see a world where everything is on one of two sides of the coin. It simplifies a world with too many faces to handle.

Of course, as Jacques Derrida famously said, it also creates, ” a violent hierarchy” where “one of the two terms governs the other.” Post-structuralists like Derrida, Michael Foucault, and Roland Barthes have critiqued the structuralist world view. Also faced with the chaos of the 20th and 21st centuries, these writers suggest that chaos will prevail no matter how much order you impose upon it; a reality that is hard to dispute.

Couched in the arms of the structuralist world view, and aided by economic models designed by Henry Ford and the like, Sir Ken Robinson argues in his book Out of Our Minds , that modern education is designed to follow an assembly-line based system that,

…operate on the manufacturing principle of linearity; in that there are distinct sequential stages to the process. Each stage is meant to build logically on the one that precedes it; overall outcomes can be predicted with reasonable reliability. The idea is that if students progress in the prescribed way through the system, and especially if they complete college, they will emerge at the far end educated and prepared for whatever the world throws at them.

We see here that perhaps this problem isn’t simply the fault of a single generation. Perhaps this is just the logical conclusion of an education system born out of the industrial revolution and structuralist philosophy.

The aforementioned article by Mickey Goodman in Huffington Post would argue that this problem is more recent. She also might suggest that it is entirely my parents’ fault. She paints a picture of Generation X and Generation Y children plagued by “Helicopter Parenting.” Her belief is that this all stems from a tragic event in 1982 when several children died from poisoning in tampered Children’s Tylenol. She paints the picture of parents throwing away Halloween candy for fear that it might be poisoned. To this I would add my third story.

I grew up close to a major theme-park. I loved the roller coasters and would ride each of them with my mom and dad, never considering the danger we were in. I have a very vivid memory from one day in line for one of the rides. This was when I was 4 or 5 years old. Ahead of us in line was a young man who’s face I still recall. It was gaunt and pale. He was tall and bony, with hair that was prematurely thin. You could tell from looking at him that something was wrong. Though he looked to be no more than 30, his body looked aged and weary. He was leaning on the railing of the line ahead of us. Suddenly, my mother told me not to touch the railing anymore. I didn’t realize until much later that it was because she was afraid that the man might have AIDS, and didn’t know if I could catch it from touching the railing after him. This was one of the other consequences of being a member of Generation X. I was born in 1982, the same year the first reported case of HIV was made public.

Since then, we have been given more and more opportunities to be afraid. In a post- 9/11 culture, we are always on our guard for things to fear. And here we see another binary. The opposite of fear is safety. And so we create a list of either/ors:

Fear/Safety

Bad/Good

Wrong/Right

All of this leads to generations of children, not defined by a culture of “instant gratification,” as Goodman suggests, but rather by fear. Technology presents a wealth of things to be afraid of, to see as different, foreign, and other. As such, we see a world full of the other side of the coin. Using our trusty binary model, where everything is either a 1 or a 0, if it isn’t like us, it must be something to fear, something that is bad, something that is wrong. Coupled with an assembly-line education, we spend our entire lives avoiding the wrong, seeking out the right, and headed towards the best. Parents then encourage this way of life. Look both ways before crossing the street. Don’t talk to strangers.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

How do we encourage this way of thinking? By rewarding the best, of course. And so we create grading systems that say that Sally is smarter than John, all based on one child’s ability to find the “right” answer. We want to encourage as many children as possible, of course, and so now both Sally and John are smarter than Lupe, and so on and so forth until, as Corey Turner presents in a piece on Weekend Edition, everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. We have come to believe that anyone who doesn’t get a reward must in some way be weak, wrong, or worst. And so, in a desire to encourage every child, we lower standards, increase the chance to PERFORM on those standards, and hand out ribbons to everyone.

It’s hard to argue with.

No parent or teacher wants to tell a child that they aren’t worthy. And any school system that is designed to “produce” people who are “ready” for the world must be held to a standard. The question is, does the standard have to be something that can simply be said to be “right.”

A great deal of recent research in education points to the fact that we learn far more from making mistakes than we do from getting the right answer. Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset, suggests that a “fixed-mindset,” in which there is a commonly accepted view that there must be one right answer, and that learners are either smart or not, right or wrong, best or worst, results in a culture of learning where people decide very early on what they can and can’t do. I believe this mindset’s natural consequence is the generation outlined by my stories here. Her suggestion is that perhaps we should look for a “growth-mindset” approach, in which learners are encouraged to assume that they are always capable of being better, and that there is always room for improvement. Educational theorists from Piaget, to Erikson, to Bloom’s taxonomy and Garnder’s Multiple Intelligences all support this idea. Salman Khan recently published an article entitled “The Learning Myth: Why I’ll Never Tell My Son He’s Smart” that I think eloquently illustrates a sea-change in the way we look at learning.

Modern-day economics is also supporting the innovation model. Successful companies in the 21st century are not those that follow a “proven” method for success. They don’t seek to replicate what is “right.” Rather Giants of contemporary industry like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are always looking for a chance to fail and learn. In his Book Creativity, Inc.  Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, recounts a history and culture of failure that has led to two of the largest companies in their respective industries: Apple and Pixar. In it, he presents Kiichiro Toyoda as a successor to Henry Ford. In the existing industrial model, workers are discouraged from looking for error, but rather to mindlessly do the “right” thing over and over. In Toyota’s model, each member of the team is tasked with looking for something wrong, seeking out improvements, and chances to learn. There is less order in this model, but if you look at the innovation of Ford vs. Toyota in the last 30 years, I would argue that you could see which one works.

These ideas have been supported by authors like Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, Thomas Friedman, and Daniel Coyle. Each author presents a world where learners are encouraged to create, to innovate, and to explore. Children are taught to fail, to look for what’s wrong, and to embrace it. These are the qualities we should seek out in our next generation.

It turns out that the helicopter parenting, or tech-ridden desire for instant gratification are not the ultimate culprit. We should stop looking at whether participation trophies are the problem. Rather, we should see them all as symptoms of an economic, political, and educational system based in a bygone industrial model and influenced by a dying philosophy of structuralism.

What’s the answer then?

Teach kids to fail.

The next generation will need to know better than anyone that there isn’t a right answer to most questions but rather that each of us has our own perspective on the world. I often like to use two analogies to prove this point. The first is a famous illustration

Upon encountering this picture, each of us can see a woman. We have a fixed idea on what age this woman is. If you have seen this picture before, then you know that there are actually two women pictured here. One of them is old and the other is young. If you look at it long enough, you might be able to see both. Here we have a binary: old/young. Whether you initially see the young woman or the old woman, you are right. There isn’t a “correct” answer here. One is not the “best.” Both perspectives are just different. We have to teach kids to seek out people who view the world from a different perspective and to learn from them. We have to teach kids to seek out “diverse” instead of “correct.”

Lastly, a story that I like to share with my students right before we get on the bus for the contest I mentioned at the beginning of this post. There is no better place to seek out failure than in the arts. What I learned after those first few years of struggling is that there was never going to be a right answer in how my choirs sang. I was never going to be the best, but neither was anyone else. That didn’t mean I should stop trying. Ultimately, what we seek out in the arts is beauty, not perfection. And much like the picture above, our perspective on beauty varies widely. So I ask my students, after months of seeking our idea of beauty, a simple question:

Raise your hand if you like sandwiches

Invariably, after I point out that a sandwich is any food that is held together between two other foods, every hand shoots up. Whether it be a hoagie, or a quesadilla, or a PB&J everyone likes some kind of sandwich. But if you gathered any three people in the same room, you would be hard pressed to find a group that could agree on which sandwich is the best. This is how I present our performance to them. We go to a room, and we sing music for people that we think is beautiful and compelling. The judges then give us a rating. This rating is based on their perspective of what is beautiful and compelling. It doesn’t mean that they are right and we are wrong or we are right and they are wrong any more than someone who likes Limburger cheese on a tortilla is right compared to someone who prefers beef-tongue on rye.  We all agree on the big picture: sandwiches are good, music is good. Or, pertaining to the wider theme here: learning is good. Our job isn’t to define what is right or wrong, but rather to encourage the dialogue. Insomuch as that means everyone gets a trophy for trying, then sign me up!

But that doesn’t mean that there are no standards.

It simply means that, rather than seeking the best, we should always seek to be better. We should encourage our students to seek rigor rather than right. We should reward kids for showing up, failing, and showing up again. This will instill in the coming generation a sense of strength, confidence, and grit that will prepare them confront their fear of the world, and ultimately conquer it.