Opinion

Tom Collins: Failing is the best way to succeed

Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins is an Irish News columnist and former editor of the newspaper.

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;; ">If there was more failure in our schools and universities, and more learning as a result, our young people would be much better equipped to deliver what society needs</span>
If there was more failure in our schools and universities, and more learning as a result, our young people would be much better equipped to deliver w If there was more failure in our schools and universities, and more learning as a result, our young people would be much better equipped to deliver what society needs

I have a confession to make. Someone in the school office once slipped me a copy of an exam paper ahead of the test. I must have been emoting in the school office and they took pity – or wanted rid of me.

We had two exam periods – winter and summer – regardless of whether it was an ‘exam year’ or not. My school loved examinations: gloried in them even.

We were made to sit in the exam hall whether or not we had an exam in that session. I was once told to do a biology exam even though I had dropped the subject at the end of third year. I scored somewhere in the high fifties, my school report said I needed to apply myself more if I was to get my biology O-level.

A need to ‘apply myself more’ was a theme of my school years. I was not the ideal student. I was a crammer and relied on speed-reading and a prayer to St Jude to get me through.

It was great training to be a journalist – that last minute race to meet a deadline.

St Jude – patron saint of hopeless cases – was my constant companion at exam times, until my fifth year when I carried out an experiment. In half my exams I prayed for help, and half I didn’t. I didn’t do any worse in the exams where I had rebuffed the saint, and my faith in his efficacy diminished.

Anyway, back to ‘that’ (now infamous and reprehensible) act of cheating. It was part one of a history test, and the subject was the Tudors. The two Henrys, Edward, Mary (always Bloody) and Elizabeth were the Kardashians of the sixteenth century.

I squirrelled the paper away in my room, and breathed a sigh of relief.

St Jude must have been upset at being usurped and intervened. What other reason could there be for the outcome. In my school career, I never scored lower than in this particular paper. The mark was 54, if memory serves me right.

This was one of those instances where it was not ‘who you knew’ that was important, but ‘what you knew’.

Exams are very much on my mind at the moment. When I finish writing this I go back to marking the tide of assessments that accompanies the end of university teaching. It’s also an exam year for one of my children, and the stress levels are beginning to rise.

As a society we have contrived to pile increasing pressure on our young people. Expectations are enormous, and social media means they are growing up in the public glare.

Pernicious platforms such as Facebook encourage competitive posting by boastful parents. Children are judged on them.

It is no surprise that mental health issues are on the rise – stress, anxiety, depression are all too often the companions of youth.

Some of the pressure comes from within. Young people have got the message that success in life is directly related to exam marks. This, as we know, is only partially true.

Success comes from determination and hard work and a little bit of luck. (And we make our own luck.)

Even if your child is resilient enough to withstand the pressures, there’s a high likelihood that someone in their circle is going under, and they know it.

The argument for assessment is that we need to be able to measure progress, and employers need a yardstick to judge applicants by.

As a result of this obsession with measuring, we have lost sight of the most important thing about education.

Learning matters more than the results in a test.

Young people’s future will be determined by what they know, and their ability to apply it in the real world. In the workplace they will be judged on performance alone – not on what they got in a test on the Tudors.

I tell my students to forget about the marks (they ignore me) and to focus on the learning. In truth, if they get the learning right the marks follow.

But some students become so worried about how they will perform in the assessment, that they are afraid to make mistakes along the way. It is only by making mistakes that we learn.

Fail, fail again, fail better, said Samuel Beckett.

If there was more failure in our schools and universities, and more learning as a result, our young people would be much better equipped to deliver what society needs.