Rethinking Failure — Is Failure the Opposite of Success?

FAILURE is the outcome that every society despises. The average person in society understands failure and success very well, and the obvious understanding is that failure is the opposite of success. Students are an integral part of society, and failure and success are two major opposite paradigms in every student's life. 

My dear readers, let us focus on failure, but the failure here is that which is actually information and not that which is the opposite of success. The real distinction we should be interested in is failing blindly and failing intelligently. And this leads us to what I have learnt from Lance G. King as failing well. Why does this concept matter? The concept of failing well is a tool in the much-needed quest to deal with the misconception of failure in society, most especially in students' lives.

What is failure? Is every failure the same? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, failure can be defined in one sentence as: "the fact of someone or something not succeeding." In modern educational frameworks, especially in international schools, failure is an essential component of learning and not its opposite. We make mistakes, commit errors, have unsuccessful experiments, encounter setbacks, and misunderstand concepts in our learning journey. Still, Lance G. King makes us understand that learning occurs at the edge of competence ("the learning zone"), where mistakes provide rich feedback. Therefore, failure should accelerate learning. This means failure is an outcome and not an identity.