Children learn from mistakes

LEARN from your mistakes is a phrase not often used in French schools, say academics, who launched a festival of errors to show that mistakes are not necessarily negative.

Détrompez-vous – Un festival d’erreurs is a science festival with a difference, an attempt to make youngsters think in a way that schools do not allow, which the organisers feel has left them lacking confidence in their own abilities.

With experiments ranging from making their own sweets to doing “impossible” feats such as filling a glass without putting anything in it, the children were shown that discoveries can be made only with a leap into the unknown.

Biology professor Michel Morange, of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where the event is held, said: “Louis Pasteur made many mistakes, but his mistakes were always positive.”

One of his great discoveries came when he mistakenly injected chickens with an old germ culture that should have given them a fatal disease. Instead, it gave only a mild form and they survived. The experiment failed because the germ culture had become spoilt, but when he tried to reinfect the chickens with a fresh culture, there was still no effect.

Pasteur realised that the chickens had become immune to the disease, and that led to the development of immunisation and vaccines.

The festival highlighted other errors that led Fleming to discover penicillin, Becquerel radioactivity, Goodyear vulcanised rubber, and even how the Post-It note was created from a useless barely sticky glue.

Maëlle Lenoir, director of the Association Paris Montagne, which organises the event, said: “A large part of the French school system is based on the idée reçue that errors are negative, when in fact it is by this very process of learning that you make progress.”

Association member Edouard Chignolet said it was not bad to make a mistake; it is a vital part of research, while Girolamo Rammuni, of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and the founder of the festival, said teaching had become ossified by searching too much for the “right answer”; he wanted more questions.

He added that “error is the mark of creativity” and said he often set impossible tasks for students: “Once they accept getting things wrong is not the end of the world, they may come up with some crazy ideas, but they will have some good ones, too.”