John McLaughlin

Hi, good morning.

Thanks for having me.

For so many students, we bring them through a system where there's no structure for failure.

We tell them all the time, you need to fail.

We tell even little kids, you need to learn through failing, try and try again.

But in reality, when they get to university, all of a sudden, it might be the first time they've truly failed at something that impacts them.

So all of a sudden, we have these many students, the first time they've ever truly failed something is at a university level.

And it just impacts them.

It brings forth anxiety.

It brings forth these things that are fear that's really understandable considering the stakes that we've put on marks and grades and all these things.

No, I think the idea is that they need to experience failure.

I think you're 100% correct.

But I think the idea is that we want them to experience at a time and a place where they can recover from it.

Why should some small piece of failure impact them for a permanent amount of time?

Think of how we have students working now.

They want to go to medical school and they need essentially a perfect average.

They want to get into engineering at a good school like Toronto.

And all of a sudden, they need to have a near perfect average.

And they live in this fear and this idea that if they screw up once,

they're not going to get into those programs.