Succeeding in school, and especially in life, is not just about IQ: certain emotional abilities also weigh in the balance. One of them is essential, and it can be taught to any child thanks to a ritual imagined by a neuroscientist.
All parents dream of seeing their children succeed in school. “Look how smart my daughter is”, “My son is the best in his class”… Exemplary schooling, punctuated by good grades and favorable assessments from teachers, is a great source of pride for the whole family. We reward a child or teenager who got 18/20 on their last test, proof of both their exceptional abilities and their hard work, or conversely, we punish a student who got a 3/20 because “he didn’t revise enough” and must pull himself together if he wants to succeed in life.
But it is precisely this perfectionist system that “muffled” an essential ability in children, as neuroscientist Vivienne Ming explains to the CNBC. This artificial intelligence specialist assures us: “Raising children by teaching them to memorize answers prepares them for jobs that may no longer exist, leaving them helpless in a world that values creativity, curiosity and problem-solving skills.” We already knew this, but it is all the more true in the age of AI: learning lessons by heart will not make a child intelligent, and will even less allow them to adapt to the jobs of the future, where ChatGPT will be able to answer all the questions for them. From now on, the only real ability that matters is failure.
“My research highlights a constant: the most brilliant students are often the most inclined to accept mistakes”notes Vivienne Ming. After studying thousands of children, the neuroscientist noticed that “exploration, and even failure, promotes deep learning better than simply repeating correct answers”. By pointing out and punishing a bad grade, for example, we teach children that “failure defines their value” rather than pushing them to improve. If everyone has already heard the famous saying “it’s by making mistakes that you learn”, in practice, few parents really implement it.
Vivienne Ming has therefore found an ultra-simple method to teach young people the ability to recover from their mistakes: the “resume of failure”. Concretely, it is about establishing a family tradition. “Once a month, ask everyone (including yourself!) to add a failure to their resume.” It could be a simple missed goal at football, a botched assignment, an abandoned project at work, a delay for an important meeting… The objective being above all to de-dramatize and no longer visualize the failure as a failure, but rather as a difficulty which perhaps allowed us to learn something.
Thanks to this CV of failure, children (just like adults!) will develop their resilience more naturally and will spontaneously associate error with the possibility of progress. The idea is obviously not to celebrate your children’s poor grades, but rather to change your perspective. Instead of asking which answers were wrong, it is better to ask what they found difficult about this assignment, and especially what lesson they can learn from this failure.
