Giving Compass' Take:

• The author wants to disrupt the "failure is okay" narrative, because for many people,  failure is not okay, and failure does not affect everyone in the same way. 

• The author discusses that normalizing failure blankets everyone's experiences with mistakes, and does not take into account the struggles of some individuals that have failed and not been okay afterward.  How can educators (and the broader society) work harder to stop normalizing failure and start speaking more inclusively?

• Read about the privilege of voice in the arts. 

Failure has become a trend in the past decade. As a society, we increasingly say "Failure is OK" or "Failure is essential to success." But in this process of normalizing failure, we ignore the fact that failure affects people differently, and that privilege plays an important role in who is allowed to fail — and who isn’t.

One entrepreneur who gave a talk at my college told us that he had borrowed $50,000 from his parents to launch his first start-up and then proceeded to go bankrupt in his first year. The lesson? Take a risk; it’s OK to fail.

I didn’t have parents who could lend me $50,000. The lesson I learned was that if I didn’t have money to risk losing, I shouldn’t be in business.

This imbalance of privilege is found in high school, too, where low-income students tend to fall behind their peers academically. By normalizing failure, we tell them it’s OK because they can take remedial courses in college to "catch up," not acknowledging that those courses will burden them with additional costs and time to degree.

Read the full article on failure by Tyler Hallmark at The Chronicle of Higher Education