A retired British primary school teacher had called for a conference and proposed that the word FAIL shouldn’t be used in the classroom and should be replaced by “deferred success.” She believed that the classroom is a place to advance and acquire new knowledge, and the word fail can diminish or even damage the students’ enthusiasm in learning. This word should as well be permanently removed from all the dictionaries.
I think this is a total absurd idea. Isn’t failure part of the learning experiences too? Isn’t it a key component to grow and to succeed? I don’t think telling the kids that “you have deferred success in this exam” can be too motivated to do well in the next one. Removing the word FAIL in our vocabularies is just absolutely ridiculous. Think about our children in the future who would never have a chance to encounter the word fail and how would they describe:
Fail in a job interview = Deferred employment
Fail in a marriage = Deferred divorce
This just leads me back to English 101 when we learned about euphemism:
Janitors = Janitorial Engineer
Stolen goods = Temporarily misplaced items
1 comment:
hahaa...honey bee, i will be the first one to leave you a comment. that was an interesting blog you posted. and i agree with you that by removing the negatives doesn't mean it will help getting the positives. everything is relative, like bright only presents because we know what dark is. without failure being on the negative end of the contrast spectrum, where does success stand? by itself? and what does it mean when no one ever fails (anymore)?
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