The value of making mistakes
I battled with essay-writing at Oxford.
The expectation of 5000 words a week of watertight, taut prose was daunting. My tutor once told me that I needed to be prepared to accept the etymology of the word ‘essay’. ‘It comes’, he told me, ‘from the French essayer ’. In other words, it is an attempt. It became clearer to me that an attempt is not a perfect solution but an offering. That offering might be great, but it might also contain its cracks and faults, and that is fine.
Essays aside, I like to think the same to be true of all stages of education. Whilst it is a much discussed area of education, being comfortable with making mistakes is such a valuable asset for any student. The fabled response to this is that we can learn from our mistakes. But learn what, exactly?
It would be easy to say you can simply learn the right thing; when you reply that England won the football World Cup in 1066, being wrong once will inform your response forever. But that kind of mistake is the less exciting end of what can be learned.
Any theory, suggestion, or answer to a question is always more valuable when it is not too concerned with being correct. By allowing the chance to be wrong, you open up much more exciting avenues of thought. Higher level education rarely has correct answers (irrespective of subject) and we should instil comfort with that in students from a young age.
I recently asked an 8-year-old student why there might have been an enormous, muscly statue of Hercules in Caracalla’s baths in Rome. ‘So that women could say they’ve had a bath with Hercules?’ came the reply. Although initially amusingly wide of the mark, we discussed how his reply could be shaped towards the truth. That kind of approach, where the fear of being absurd or incorrect is conquered by instinctive thinking and engagement, is the axis around which education should rotate.
There is a quotation for all this. ‘Errare humanum est’ is often printed on rubbers at Galleries. It might be from Seneca, it probably isn’t: ‘to err is human’. But the value of erring is less vague than ‘human’. How we use mistakes is where real productivity lies. Rarely is the first iteration of an idea the best version of itself. In all fields, at all ages, mistakes used well are the fuel for exciting outcomes.
By George V
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