The PR announcement came out today: Columbia University has launched a new center to research failure and its role in learning, growth and success.<\/p>\n
Based at the Ivy League university’s prominent graduate school of education — which preps future teachers — the Education for Persistence and Innovation Center’s goals are “to inspire people to persist and triumph over adversity; to help them channel frustration and use negative emotions constructively; to identify effective strategies for overcoming failure; and to learn how organizations can help employees fail successfully,” according to a news release.<\/p>\n
It’s come to this: today’s helicopter-parented, participation-trophy generation has been coddled so much it does not understand the value of failure and has to be taught it. The blame lies largely with parents.<\/p>\n
It’s no secret that most parents of millennials made it their top goal to shield their kids from any hurt, defeat, insult or disappointment. They put their kids on a pedestal and worshipped the ground they walked on: coddled them, defended them, fought their battles for them.<\/p>\n
Now we see the results: a generation of crybullies who often flip out when they get anything less than an A, meltdown when they hear things with which they disagree, and in general think that life is a series of successes. When the inevitable failure comes, they don’t know how to process it.<\/p>\n
Don’t just take my word for it:\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re talking about students showing up in residential life offices distraught and inconsolable when they score less than an A-minus. Ending up in the counseling center after being rejected from a club. Students who are unable to ask for help when they need it, or so fearful of failing that they will avoid taking risks at all,”\u00a0according<\/a> to Rachel Simmons, a facilitator for Smith College’s “Failing Well” program<\/a>, which helps students grapple with life\u2019s challenges.<\/p>\n Columbia and Smith colleges are not alone. Last fall, Princeton offered a class<\/a> to freshmen called \u201cThe \u201cOther \u2018F\u2019 Word \u2014 Success and Innovation\u2019s Sibling?” The F word, as you have probably guessed, is failure. In 2016, East Carolina University started an “adulting” program<\/a> to help students who are terrified of failure.<\/p>\n University administrators everywhere are practically tripping over themselves to make their campuses a “safe space,” worried the slightest challenge might send their student body into a tizzy.<\/p>\n The New York Times<\/em> has also reported<\/a> on programs at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania that chronicle setbacks and stumbling blocks of successful alumni as a means of encouragement.<\/p>\n But at the end of the day, it should not be higher education’s job to teach kids the value of failure. First and foremost, parents must instill in their children the harsh realities of life — let them fall and get back up themselves.<\/p>\n