A Psycho-Educational Approach to Coping with Failure Amongst Pupils

In this paper I hope to explain the reasons for developing a method to provide the individual with tools to cope with failure at an early stage of his life; additionally, the general principles of that method will be formulated. Obviously, the basic objective is ultimately aimed at conditioning the child's thinking towards development of different attitudes in relation to failure situations. Success of the method, in the long run, depends upon the repetition of similar techniques, at least during the first years of the child's schooling. Thus we tend to believe that if we ‘instil’ in the child the proposed way of relating, he will then be able to cope not only with failure in the future but also with pressures exerted by unskilled teachers in school, who may use failure as a threat. As an additional alternative there is proposed a general model of treating children who have not been trained at an earlier stage to deal with failure within the school framework.