Is punishing mistakes a mistake?

Our tutor and navigator have (understandably) different attitudes toward mistakes.   The tutor is very tolerant of them among his students, indeed seeking them out.  Many students immediately start to erase their work on a problem, if they get it wrong or if they decide they’ve done it the wrong way.  He tries to stop them.  How they’ve approached the problem, what steps they’ve done and in what order, tell him a great deal about what he needs to do.  Often the student is almost there and it’s only a small change that needs to be made; in any case, once he understands how much the student grasps, he can supply the rest.  The important thing is that the student try the problems, for only that way can we even start the process.  Mistakes are an important part and the student can’t be afraid to make them.

The navigator is highly intolerant of mistakes.  Working an old-fashioned celestial sight by hand takes a long string of calculations, in any of which a mistake can throw the whole effort into nonsense.  While on soundings, mistaking a bearing by ten degrees (easy enough to do under pressure and with insufficient sleep) can run the ship aground.  He has developed a whole system of double-checks and cross-checks, some unconscious and some deliberate, to avoid errors and detect any that get through.  “A navigator is always worried,” he says, “sometimes more, sometimes less.”

The two attitudes are less opposed than they appear.  Allowing mistakes is proper for a teaching environment and necessary for real learning.  Our navigator made mistakes as he learned his trade, in exercises where no ships actually sailed, and learned a great deal from them.  Indeed, his system of self-checking is based on the mistakes he and others have made along the way.  It’s just that mistakes are less acceptable when real outcomes depend on the process.

What are we to make, then, of mistakes on social media?  The news routinely has stories on this or that person, famous or unknown, whose post or tweet has “gone viral.”  A thoughtless moment on the smartphone and you’re held up for abuse by thousands or millions.  The immediacy of social media, inseparable from its appeal, means that second thoughts are precluded and no one thinks it over overnight.  And the many data-storage systems connected to the Net mean that erasing a bad idea completely is simply impossible.

So are we raising, or should we raise, the Careful Generation?  When a teenage tweet could cost you a future job, should we (somehow) firmly control what our adolescents broadcast?  We’re pessimistic about whether this would be practical.  Perhaps more important, it precludes a way to make mistakes to learn from, and the teenage years are if anything a time to learn from mistakes.

The alternatives seems to be a much increased level of forgiveness, or perhaps a shorter effective memory.  Unfortunately, we don’t detect the former in society today.  Are we, then, in the uncomfortable position of trusting to today’s short attention span to make up for a social problem?