Increasingly, educators are concluding that many of the policies in schools around the country are threatening the fundamental skills that underlie student creativity and, by extension, the creativity of tomorrow’s workforce.

1. The Positive Power of
Failure
By Douglas Reeves

2. Camp Nageela Midwest
provides an exciting, enriching
summer experience for Jewish
youth.
Increasingly, educators
are concluding that
many of the policies in
schools around the
country are threatening
the fundamental skills
that underlie student
creativity and, by
extension, the creativity
of tomorrow’s workforce.

3. Proposals
● To address this issue, experts have proposed
encouraging collaboration, promoting
constructive criticism, and reconsidering
traditional grading standards.
● They have also proposed that schools adopt a
different, more tolerant attitude toward failure.

4. Failure
● Failure, of course, can come from simple
negative attitudes: apathy, laziness, or
procrastination, for instance. These types of
failure aren’t helpful or potentially productive.
● On the other hand, “instructive” failures—
those that provide us with opportunities to
learn from error—arise naturally from the
creative process.

5. History reveals countless
examples of innovators,
including the likes of
Henry Ford, Langston
Hughes, and Gloria
Steinem, who tried but
failed many times before
succeeding.
Henry Ford
Positive Examples

6. Experimentation
● By embracing the trials and errors that come from
a persistent, experimental mindset, students are
empowered to push the boundaries of their own
exploration.
● This also equips them with a valuable skill set
applicable in practically any profession.
● Most importantly, it enables them to discover how
to contend realistically with failures borne of real
effort, instead of shying away from them.

7. Conclusion
● Most creative endeavors end in failure. By
shielding students from such a result through
arbitrary, simplistic, or unimaginative
learning processes, we’re not doing any
favors for them or our future.