Think back to your experiences in middle and high school. How many opportunities were you given to experiment and “fail” in solving a problem? How could a school work today where students were regularly offered such opportunities?
When I think back to high school and middle school, we were rarely given the opportunity to experiment and fail in problem solving. It’s not like the teachers told us that we could take the test but if we failed then we could just take it again. If this were the case, then nobody would feel the need to study. According to Shirky, the overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost. If students are not given the opportunity to experiment and fail, then they would try harder the first time, therefore reducing the likelihood of failure. If a school offered students opportunities to experiment and fail, it would be more expected for students to fail the first time. This would lower the cost of failure because the students would not be expecting to pass. This would be failure for free because it allows the student to learn from their mistakes and try again.
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The question to consider is this: what's the cost of failure worth? It's worth your time... there's nothing wrong with failure in so much as the experience can teach you something. Think here of failure not as "F" on a test, but seeing if puzzle pieces fit together... you fail many times in a puzzle trying to figure it out.
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