STUDENT, who had achieved very high results in her Leaving Certificate, had got the required number of points for the third level course she wished to pursue, was sitting in on her first lecture. It was on mathematics. The lecturer was waxing lyrically on his material but she was unable to follow or understand what he was saying. The male student next to her was feverishly writing down every word and formula that dropped from the lecturer's lips. She turned to her peer and asked "do you understand what he's saying?" He replied confidently that he did and resumed immediately his writing.

On receipt of his answer to her question, she closed her notebook, walked out of the lecture room and made her way down to the admissions office where she duly cancelled her course. Three weeks later she was sitting in front of me in a considerable state of depression and helplessness. What has brought this competent young woman to such a state of consternation?

Certainly, from her description of her first university lecture, she did not embrace failure. On the contrary, she fled its occurrence and compounded her flight by dropping out of college. In such avoidance reactions she escaped ingeniously any further experience of academic failure. However, she had not escaped the sad reality that an important area of her life - her academic and professional career - were now blocked, giving rise to her feelings of helplessness about herself and her future.

Clearly, this young woman saw learning as a series of successful experiences and failures as evidence of lack of ability on her part. This is an all too common confusion that children and adults experience when they encounter failure. A lack of knowledge (as in the student's case) or mistakes and failure indicate a deficit in competence in the particular area of knowledge being pursued, (mathematics in the student's story), it does not indicate a lack of ability. Human beings have limitless capacity to learn and knowing this is what makes for confidence.

However, when you confuse competence with confidence you are likely to over react to failure or lack of knowledge by doubting your ability to master the course. As for the student above, you may now drop out of the course wherein you experienced failure. What a pity. Your wonderful capacity to gain from failure now goes abegging.

The pressure to succeed is the greatest disease that exists in our educational system. The other side of that disease coin is the dread of failure. When parents, teachers and students themselves approach learning with these pressures and restrictions, on two fronts they effectively remove the two essential aspects to learning. The old wise saying that "you learn from your mistakes" is contradicted strangely by the message in our culture that says "you daren't make a mistake or fail".

Nevertheless, mistakes and failures are the stepping stones to successful learning and successes in turn are stepping stones to further mistakes and failures.

Every day each one of us has a mixture of failure and successful experiences. We must embrace both experiences as integral to learning and achievement. We need also to, realise that there is no such phenomenon as a successful person or a person who is a failure.

HIS use of success and failure as absolutes arises from viewing such events as saying something about the person rather than about behaviour. You are not your behaviour: no experience, whether unsuccessful or successful defines your worth in this world. If you believe it does, as the young woman in the above story, you are doomed to a difficult, limited and relatively unproductive life.

Getting it wrong as more important that getting it right. Mistakes and failures help us to better understand the process of learning any aspect of study (whether academic or non academic). Knowing the answer does not mean you are knowledgeable.

It is time that mistakes and failures are redeemed as essential and worthwhile milestones in teaching and learning. They are the gems in the crown of any achievement. Teachers and parents need to let themselves and children know that mistakes and failures are happy experiences, ones that are to be embraced and cherished and used to progress further down the path of learning.

Equally, successful events need to be redeemed from exaggerated appraisal so that people stop using them as means of getting recognition in this world and begin to employ them as just one more stage in the endless and joyful process of learning.

The young woman in the story had much to learn. Indeed, at this time what she needed to learn was far more important than pursuing her academic career. Neither age nor education are indices of emotional and social maturity. Most of all, I needed to help her to separate out her personal worth from her behaviour, particularly, academic performance. She also needed to learn to embrace failure. She is currently back at university and celebrating all aspects of university life.

In accepting and embracing failure, new things can be born in all of us.