Reuters reports a group of teachers in the UK wants to remove the word "fail" from use in British classrooms. One term which has been suggested as a replacement is "deferred success." Now that's a hoot!

This story reminded me of one sadistic but very fair college professor I once had. My professor had the wisdom to recognize that "in real life people do often fail." He told us, most of us, if not all, would experience failure at some time in our lives. We should recognize that failure is the norm. It doesn't make much difference how often we fail or how badly but how we deal with each failure that will determine our relative success. He suggested that he should hand out failing grades to most of us since most of us had not achieved mastery over the subject matter. He was right. Then again, he was known as an easy grader so must of us did not take what he said to heart.

Over the past several months I have seen several stories about how a kid's baseball team in Ohio was removed from its league because it had become too good. No other team could beat them. So naturally the league's solution was to disband that team. I have also seen other stories, particularly in the educational setting, which have discussed ways in which children should avoid being told they had done something less than wonderful. This plays into the mindset which thinks kids become failures solely because they need greater confidence. I fall into the category of those who think this is utter nonsense.

We live in a society that is a little games-crazy. Children and adults love to play games of all sorts. TV is filled not only with the usual deluge of baseball, football, basketball, etc., but also with "reality" TV shows which consist of games of every imaginable type. There are games to find a spouse, win ballroom dancing competitions, eat the most disgusting thing, etc. We love games of all kinds. We love games period.

The one simple fact of games is that in every one there is always a winner and a loser. The more competitors there are, the more losers there are while the number of true winners remains one. Not only that, when we get reasonably good at a particular game, we seek out better and better competition. Playing games against those who are not up to our skill level is extremely boring. We crave the challenge of trying to beat the unbeatable competitor. We are willing to torture ourselves in order to get the shot at beating a great player. We seek out situations in which losing is almost guaranteed in order to better ourselves. We build our entire lives around this reality. We push our kids into difficult sports and other kinds of competitions not because we realistically think they have a chance to be the ultimate victor but because we want them to view competition the way we view it, as good clean fun. We recognize that when our children "lose," they really win because they earn to persevere, to improve, to strive for higher goals.

So what's up with the folks who would like to remove the term "failure" not just from our schools but really from our children's lives? What is it they think they are accomplishing? The reality is that they are not in any way preventing real failure. Kids and adults alike know when they have not achieved success. These people are actually preventing success by "deferring failure" or the recognition of it until a point at which the losers can not learn from their mistakes.