Failing well is a skill. Letting girls do it gives them critical practice coping with a negative experience. It also gives them the opportunity to develop a kind of confidence and resilience that can only be forged in times of challenge.
Interpretation
Learning to fail productively helps build resilience and confidence, particularly in young girls.
This quote emphasizes the importance of allowing young girls to experience failure as it equips them with necessary life skills. Facing challenges and setbacks enables them to develop resilience, confidence, and the ability to cope with adversity, ultimately preparing them for future obstacles. In this sense, failure is not just a negative experience but a valuable opportunity for growth.
In practice
In a workshop on building resilience, I would quote this to emphasize the value of learning from failure.
You don't learn how to say 'hey, I have a problem,' but you also don't learn how to hear it. There's a total breakdown of how females talk to one another. It's very disconcerting for leadership because it means you don't talk to each other; you talk about each other.
All around me, I see girls forced to become rat racers in the College Application Industrial Complex, the subculture where students must craft themselves into the perfect specimens for college admission and often lose their authenticity, love of learning, and sense of self in the process.
When I did the original research for 'Odd Girl Out,' I asked every bullied girl I interviewed to tell me what she needed most from her family. The answer truly surprised me. It wasn't having the best solutions, calling the school, or trying to act like everything was okay. It was empathy.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
It would be great to have every engineer have at least some amount of knowledge of machine learning.
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
I always tell kids, you have two eyes and one mouth. Keep two open and one closed. You never learn anything if you're the one talking.
One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.
And once we have given our community a good start,' I pointed out, ' the process will be cumulative. By maintaining a sound system of education you produce citizens of good character, and citizens of sound character, with the advantage of a good education, produce in turn children better than themselves and better able to produce still better children in their turn, as can be seen with animals.
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