"Mistaken" Pedagogies

 I remember a professor in undergraduate philosophy explaining how he was dumbfounded to learn how students are afraid of making mistakes. He mentioned the idea of "being penalized for one's mistakes", which means that students don't like the feeling of being punished as the result of making an incorrect action or assumption. I found that what students often forget is that they are always generating theories about life, and "mistakes" are actually well-thought theories which happen to be misapplied to some situations. For this reason, I consider it best not to conclude that one's mistakes are necessarily always bad and all the time.
   A model of mistakes that stress them as "forms of theorizing" about life has at least two advantages. The first is that it validates the learner as someone who does have a storehouse of ideas, and is always advancing forward with new ways to process experiences. The second, related to the first, is that it does not "write off" one's mistakes as necessarily bad things, but rather frames them in terms of newly emerging information that may not have been present to the learner at the time that the original acts or thoughts were performed which lead to the mistake. Because one's theories are always based on temporary conditions, one can never arrive at a theory that contains every possibility, although some theories certainly are more effective than others in certain ways. At least, one can say that in scientific contexts, theories can be refined to take in more complex aspects of a situation, as well as account for more detailed phenomena.
   Sometimes, pedagogy and schools in general reinforce the idea that mistakes are signs of either stupidity, or ignorance, or perhaps even a character flaw, such as laziness. If students internalize these ideas, they quickly lose the motivation to be active theorists of experience, becoming instead passive or even depressed about their prospects. How many students decide not to continue with any kind of education, whether formal or informal, simply because they got into their minds the idea that they are "incorrigible", "less than the others", "inferior", or even "incapable of learning or improvement". These ideas lead students to become disenchanted with even the possibility of learning, let alone giving themselves the chance to explore detours or try out new approaches that might lead to new outcomes.