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.
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.
As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
I had never seen a white teacher before, but Mrs. Henry was the nicest teacher I ever had.
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
I'm a professor - there should be some lessons learned - and how you can use the stuff you hear today to enable your dreams or enable the dreams of others. And as you get older you may find that enabling-the-dreams-of-others thing is even more fun.
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