Like most schoolchildren, I was a connoisseur of erasers. I loved the squishy putty variety and the big smooth oval ones but I hated the usesless pinks things attached to the end of pencils, although they were quite nice to bite. However strongly I felt about them, it would never have occurred to me to view them in terms of good and evil.
But Guy Claxton, a cognitive scientist and visiting professor at King’s College, London, has proclaimed that erasers are an “instrument of the devil” and, as such, they should be banished from our classrooms. Children should be encouraged to learn from their mistakes, rather than feel ashamed of them, he explains. They shouldn’t feel the need to pretend to have got things right the first time, but should be encouraged to try things out, take wrong turns and see what they can learn in the process.
It all appears to make perfectly good sense, although the theological thunderousness of his message has raised a few eyebrows. Erasers might be bad for learning, but are they really the work of evil?
While Claxton’s dire warning might very well be an off-the-cuff remark taken out of context, perhaps there is some sense to it. Rather than just a matter of excusing sloppiness, learning to deal with failure is actually a key lesson in life.
In support of his statement, Claxton cites a book called How Children Succeed by the aptly named American author Paul Tough. Apparently we need to be cultivating resilience and curiosity in young people if we want them to get on in life. Pass-or-fail tests are no way to do this – schools must pave the way for flexibility and creativity. This way our children will grow up to be the kind of people the market requires. Bingo! Better for them, better for everyone. Still, I hardly think this is what Samuel Beckett had in mind when he wrote, “Fail again. Fail better”.
Suddenly, wrong is the new right. Or at least Claxton seems to be speaking about a special brand of neoliberal failure whose ultimate objective is success. The paradoxical sort of failure invoked by Wimbledon High School, a top London school for girls, where during its “Failure Week” in 2012, pupils were given the courage to fail by being shown YouTube videos detailing the failures people suffered before they became extremely famous and successful.
I know from my own teenage daughter – who has grown up in a world where everyone can edit their entire existence to online perfection – how pressed she feels to do well. Being in the top set at school means everything (and that’s not just the official top sets, but the playground ones too). Telling her I love her irrespective of grades can’t counterbalance the massive cultural imperative to be excellent in every way.
What if kindness, rather than success, was at the heart of the eraser debate? What does all this erasing do to us as people? School room pencil shame is just the start. We can now rub anything out of an image using Photoshop, and can use surgery to rub out so-called physical imperfections in real life. We expect medicine to be able to cure us of pretty much everything. We can straighten our teeth, use drugs to regulate our moods, and computers to fill gaps in our memories and knowledge. There is no excuse for being anything marginally short of physically and psychologically perfect. And if we can’t tolerate flaws in ourselves, why should we tolerate them in others?
Rather than worrying that erasers will make our children failures, shouldn’t we be more afraid of making them cruel? I’m with Claxton on the “devil” front, but I think it’s a different devil that I’m scared of.