Earlier this term I read a one page article, The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research. The article proclaims the importance of – nay – the imperative of learning from mistakes as a valuable education path. The author describes his astonishment that a very bright fellow PhD student gave up a career path because it made her feel stupid. His own perspective was that the most interesting problems were those that were very difficult to solve, and that that was why he was going to get a PhD at the end of his dissertation work. It reminds me of Marilla Svinicki’s talk last year at the Presidents’ Colloquium, in which she advised the importance of teaching students how to fail so they could learn the process of picking themselves up again and carrying on. To what extend do we explicitly encourage students in this regard? Maybe Buckminster Fuller had the right idea when he said,
If I ran a school, I’d give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
Of course, that’s only for our students, right? And yet, to what extent do we model that failure is a temporary (and enlightening) set-back? I wonder how many of us have submitted an article and then let the revisions lie for months (or longer?) because the reviews seemed negative? How many times do we submit for a grant or award and get turned down – only to never think of applying again? How many times do we truly admit to our students “I don’t know” – and join in an inquiry process with them to find out?
Benjamin Zander, conductor of both the Boston symphony orchestra and the youth orchestra, exhorts young musicians to celebrate mistakes as a way of getting out of the cyclical process of self abuse for errors made. His recommendation that we throw our arms in the air and shout “hurray, a mistake!” might be a bit disconcerting in some circles, but the general idea is good: Mistakes are steps along a path to eventual (and perhaps enhanced) success. In a wonderful TED lecture, Ken Robinson reminds us, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything creative.”
Still worried about making mistakes? Smile instead on John Kenneth Galbraith’s reminder that “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”
Scwartz, M. A. (2008). The importance of stupidity in research. Journal of Cell Science, 121, 1771.
