Willful Failure

The Oxford English dictionary defines the word voluntary with the phrases “arising or developing in the mind without external constraint… spontaneous origin or character,” while the word volitive is described via “of or pertaining to the will… performed deliberately or with express intention.” The difference between such related words as voluntary and volitive surely seems trivial, but in thinking about education and my thesis, the difference is important. Recently at my December committee meeting, the members prodded me to describe the ideal system of education that I would prefer to our current one. ‘All this time you’ve been assailing what we have now. What would you want?’ Certainly, I have spent so much time denouncing the current pedagogy and researching evidence for its failure. But what, indeed, would I prefer? Somehow, remarkably, I have let this question gather dust over the years of this project. It’s definitely easy to decry what exists, but to propose something entirely new? That’s much more difficult.

Thankfully, my committee members let me off the hook this time, but I fear they won’t be able to let me loose without anything to show for my work much longer. It has been months since my formal creative thesis project began in September. Since then, I have a roughly one page introduction that simply lays out the idea for my project. A literature review, the finer points of my argument, my methods and abstract—nowhere to be found. It is time for me to correct my dearth of work and to put into writing what I have been thinking about for all this time.

What I’ve been thinking about, then, comes down to the twin ideas behind voluntary and volitive. Case in point: Near the end of the December meeting, Dr. Wiles, the superintendent of schools at our district, interrupted my fumbling to point out that my project is a prime example of the ideal education that I have alluded to throughout my research. In meetings or in my intro drafts, I’ll talk about self-guided learning, the burdens of the lecture model and the obsolescence of rote and memorization. Students, I contend, must be allowed to fail on their own, without the fetters of tests and grades that dilute the ownership of one’s learning. Clearly obvious to everyone in the room, I had been failing with my project for some time. But in arguing and defending my points, in explaining the research that I have done and plan to do, I was, as Wiles explained, a living example of the kind of independent learning I so supported. In June for the symposium where my peers and I will present our projects in our high school’s auditorium, it would be interesting, she said, to present on this idea. “And I will be in the audience waiting to ask whether or not it worked.”

So, will it work? Does autodidactic learning work? This is the axiom of my project. Much of my research has been focused on the reflection of economy in education, the relative illiteracy of upcoming generations in the skills of the day, the reasons why our current school system lacks the ability to teach the skills of the day. But the center of all this project is, as Dr. Wiles said, an endorsement of something different, something better. Although I failed to articulate this other system in my December meeting, and may have botched the language many times before, in thinking it over, it really is simpler than I’d been making it out to be. A better system than exists in America today would be rooted in will, would be rooted in intention. For a while I was struggling with the ideas of “spontaneity, freedom,” etc. But autodidactic learning is more than just voluntary. It is willful. It is a wonderful idea to imagine a cohort of students who have volunteered to learn, who are guiding themselves voluntarily. But a better education system would require more than just election. It would necessitate intention. Most of all, it would entail failure. Failure is the key to growth. Anyone who is successful will tell you that they didn’t get to where they were from a guidebook or a college class, they got their from hard work, experience, practice—all which, inevitably, entail failure. Now kids today fail in schools—they get bad grades, they flunk a test. But these failures are removed from the urgency of growth. If someone fails a test, they can just do better on the next one. Few mechanisms entreat the student to return to what they did not understand and relearn it. In the crush of homework and assessments and projects, there is little time for that. Contending with a numbers game as nebulous as modern grade point averages, students are frankly discouraged from truly learning material, especially when there is so much to learn. In an environment where the student has engineered their own project, failures are far more painful, and growth—therefore—far more triumphant and personal. Ultimately, the success obtained from teaching oneself, from traveling one’s own path, is far more worthy, genuine, and powerful than any success achieved by rote and by following.

This kind of learning is the heart of my claim. I’m going to continue to speak of this dimension of autodidacticism as willful failure. Without intention, without deliberate purpose, liberal education means little. Students who ho are pushed into the wilderness and challenged to find their way to success on their own will be best equipped for success, because they will fail of their own volition. It will be the task of this project to demonstrate this, as well as to outline how such a model ought to be arrived at in our sprawling, leviathan modern schooling system. First, however, it would be wise to outline how the current system fails to provide the above education for American students. We must first understand where we are before we can imagine where to go next. Indeed, this project of mine will be a test for the claim that self-guided learning works best. We will certainly see if it does.