If you’re too afraid of failure to play Wordle, I blame the education system.
I heard recently about some high school students who had given up playing Wordle because the fear of breaking a streak by failing to guess a word was debilitating. They would rather not play it than ever get it wrong.
Now, maybe it’s apocryphal, and maybe it’s too anecdotal to draw big conclusions, but the story rings true to me as evidence of a much larger problem.
Our education system has created young adults who only want to try things when they know they’ll be successful. Seth Godin’s maxim, “This might not work” is anathema to these young people. It’s a sign to turn around and walk away.
But your life will be full of failures, of small and large slips and falls. Practicing avoidance in high school, when the safety net should be massive, bodes terribly for their futures.
We need to do much, much more to empower our young people to fail without consequence. It’s the only way they’ll succeed in the long run.
It is tangibly worse than when I started teaching, and when I started teaching, it was tangibly worse than when I was a student. We need to change direction.