Review_Author: Jie Yan
Book_Author: H. Varenne & R. McDermott
Book_Title: Successful Failure: The school America builds
Reference: Varenne, H., & McDermott, R. (1998). Successful failure:
The school America builds. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Date: 5/3/2002
Time: 8:45:11 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.50.123
One day I was reading the book Successful Failure: The school America builds by Varenne and McDermott, a friend who is chemistry major happened to see the title and was obviously surprised by the title and tried to argue with me about the totally wrong logic of the author. How can you use the word “successful” to describe “failure”? to be frank, it is this seemingly illogical title that arose my interest in this book for the book review project.
Without a money system, there is no debt; Without a kinship system, no orphans; Without a class system, no deprivation; Without schools, no learning disabilities.
As Varenne and McDermott stated in one of the chapters, they believed that the existence of learning disability or academic failure was due to the existence of school education itself, further more, due to the American culture. They argued that the majority of theories and research in learning, though different in their specific emphasis, mostly work with the given categories of success and failure defined by the American culture as a fact of life. Children are either identified as having succeeded or failed. This is book is an “investigation of who and what are involved in the eventual evaluation of life as a success or failure in school terms, who is responsible, and whom or what, should we celebrate, or blame?” The author’s attention was not focused on the cause of success or failure, but on the questions themselves and on those who ask them.
This eight-chapter book was written based on research through many years by Varenne, McDermott and their colleagues. In the first four chapters the authors looked at students officially identified as failing and they found them to be “amazingly complex and ingenious in their responses to the pressures of their condition”. Each chapter presented a case study on an individual child or a group of children who were either labeled as “learning disabled”, “disadvantageous”, or lacking motivation to learn. In a word, all the children in these studies generally will fall in the category of “academic failure” or “losers” with the standards of most academic evaluation. However, the authors proved with their study that these “failures” can manage complex tasks and show that they are capable in the contexts that match their own script of learning. Adam showed four different levels of performance in four different kinds of school activities, but the school evaluation system usually will pick up only the one he was worst at to show that he is “learning disabled”. It is not that Adam can’t learn, Joe cannot read, the street kids cannot cooperate for a choir, or the West Side HS students are doomed to fail, it is our school system and our culture CHOOSE them to fail. As the authors said earlier, “the problem is that not all individuals in the United States get to go where some others go; everyone can race; only one can win…Learning Disability of all types (whether grounded in biology, emotional traumas, or cultural difference) are consequential only to the extent that they are made to fit within a cultural system that identifies them”. Though the school and educator who labeled the child showed their most sincere efforts to help them with their “disability”, the labeling behavior itself probably makes more damage than the help. “Failure is a dangerous category, easy to overuse institutionally and terribly unfair to young children who are increasingly subject to classification before their potential are meaningfully explored.”
The fifth chapter took Allwin School as an example of the prosperous suburban middle school in which children perform well. It is a sharp contrast to the inner-city schools and learning disable students the authors mentioned in earlier chapters in the terms of school evaluation system. However, Varenne and McDermott pointed out that they are rarely more than one step ahead of failure. In schools like Allwin, quizzes and test function as markers of passage that punctuate the beginnings and endings of work on units of academic study. For a child to be “the best,” others must be “second” best, and the rest must be “the rest” or just “failure”. Failure is always possible, always imminent, always immediately around the corner.
Based on the case studies in chapters 1-5, the authors pointed out that the existence of a difference in school performance is consequential only when the society and culture attaches meaning to it. “it may take a whole village to raise a child, but in America, at the most sacred of times when lives are in balance, the child stands alone for the village to judge.” In the chapter “Disability as a Culture Fact”, Varenne and McDermott cited H.G. Wells’ short story “The Country of the Blind” and history of the community of deaf individuals in Martha’s Vineyard in Cape Cod Massachusetts to point out that it is not that the individuals in these communities are “disabled”, it is the mainstream society that different the blind or deaf communities THINK that they are “disabled”. Under their own standards and culture, the blind people in the country of blind and the deaf people in Martha’s Vineyard are perfectly normal.
I liked this book because it gives me a different perspective to look at learning disability and the school evaluation system, and the examine the definition of success and failure in my own mind and own life. Though Varenne and McDermott claimed that “successful failure” is a culture fact of the American society, I believe it exists in the Chinese education as well. The example of student life in Allwin School in many aspects is so similar to many typical Chinese schools. The sad thing is, we always look at those students who succeeded, but never pay attention to how many “losers” the school system has produced along the years. Since only about 1 of 5 students can enter college in many areas in China, we can imagine what the effect will be on the society when 4/5 of the citizens are once labeled “failure” in their lives. It is time to change our perspective on success and failure. I highly recommend this book to all the teachers and researchers, and those who think themselves as losers in the academic world. Maybe it is not you are not good enough to fit the system, but the system not good enough to recognize you.