Our world is changing so quickly we can hardly keep up. I looked at my daughter last week and thought to myself, how can I ensure that she has a competitive edge in her education. If she chooses a career in IT and earns a degree in said area, it’s quite possible that due to the rapid rate that of change, she could graduate and her degree be deemed obsolete… okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration. But the former is still true, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up the pace set before us.

So how do we as educators keep up with this ever evolving system? I suggest the solution is that we teach our students to question everything. to search for truth for themselves and not just be content with being spoon-fed standards based knowledge. When a young adult has already acquired the skill set which enables them to step out of the box and take creative risks. The more innovative the future generation is, the more advanced our society should become.

Eddie describes smart failure as attempting a task, getting it wrong but still being praised for the attempt. He states that this is the new way of doing things. Whereas the old way would have ridiculed you for getting something wrong and this is because it was expected that one should follow a prescribed way of doing things, or at least consult with someone with more experience. However, the new way requires and accepts failure.

Eddie states that, “the pace of change overtakes the pace of learning”. Therefore as educators, we need not resist the change, but embrace it. Because change is so rapid, rather than overworking our selves to keep up with it, we must learn to become malleable in the face of change, and teach our students to do the same.