Craft educates failure. There are bad days for the craftsman; the temptation is to dismiss them. [Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft: An Inquiry into the Nature of Crafts and Craftsmanship 11 (1979)]. They are easy enough to dismiss. Why dwell on one's bad moments, on days that don't go well, on failure? Schooled in the power of positive thinking, striving to succeed, we try to forget our mistakes, and dismiss the very thought of failure. The mind focused on success (prompted by a culture that worships it and media that never lets us forget it) cuts us off from the education that failure makes possible.

Carla Needleman decides to "look more carefully at these days of useless struggle and embarrassing incompetence" in her work as a potter [11]. David Hilfiker, a physician, devotes a chapter to "Mistakes," some of them of the most serious kind. [David Hilfiker, Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at His Work 72-86 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985)]. Needleman confronts her failures directly and seeks to learn from them, to make failure a part of her education in and from the craft to which she commits herself. A day in which failure is prominent "puts me back at the beginning," says Needleman, it "shows me how little I know, and, by returning me from my self-importance, sets me again in my own skin, smaller, and more human." [12]. Hilfiker realizes that neither his medical education nor his profession have prepared him for the kind of medical mistakes he makes in his practice and he must find a way to learn to live with them, and with no help in sight from his professional colleagues.

We tend to shy away from talk about failure; Needleman, Hilfiker, and Pirsig take us in the other direction.

Here is how Needleman describes one of those days in which things don't go well:

There are times when the clay is too hard or too soft, wedging tires me, there's a draft from somewhere on my feet, and I seem to have forgotten how to throw. I overestimate the strength of the clay and the pot collapses. The next ball of clay unaccountably refuses to stick to the wheelhead. At last it does, I raise it into a cylinder and begin to shape it only to find a piece of sponge in the wall. I dig out the sponge and try to patch the hole–to no avail. Beginning with another ball of clay, I find that I'm using too much water, an indication to me that I'm not in control of the clay. I rush to center it, feeling how much time I've wasted, and have trouble. I don't like the sound of the bearing on the wheel and there seems to be a wobble at high speeds. I begin to make the opening before the clay is properly centered and when I pull it up at the top is uneven. I cut it with the needle and when I pull it up again find I have to cut still more off the top. There is more clay discarded on the table than there is on the wheel. . . . I'm aggressive, I attack the clay, can't do anything right, get tired, dirty, and miserable, produce two pots I know then and there I'm going to break up tomorrow, and stop for the day. [11-12]

Needleman sees this particular effort at making pots embarrassing, but embraces the effort because it is "truthful." [11]. It's a day that takes her "back to the beginning" and makes her more human. [12]. She cannot be truthful, unless she is most human, open to the truth that incompetence is possible. It is with this acceptance of the craft as an education in failure that Needleman posits her real purpose–the study of myself. [12] [Needleman at 15, 21, 22-23]

The real failures that craft makes possible are juxtaposed to the high hopes we bring to craft work:

I started out with a vision, an idealized picture of the craftsman at work. I visualized myself becoming more and more proficient, learning from my mistakes and producing increasingly more beautiful pots. I imagined that I could be dedicated and serious and saw myself as if from outside, sitting at the wheel in a large, orderly studio filled with pottery in various stages of completion, my head bent in concentration, all my movements sure and purposeful. [13].

While there are significant "obstacles to living the vision" Needleman claims that it has "never completely faded." [13]. Indeed, when she talks about the craft of pottery to others, she "still sometimes speak[s] from this vision." [13]. It is our visions that make failure livable. Needleman sees in failure the "springboard of hope." [15]

Failure is most notable with those who are still learning, those who consider themselves in the apprentice stage of craft work. The student and apprentice know the reality of failure. A student cannot become a master except by way of failure. Needleman sees the inevitability of failure on the part of the apprentice as a way of beginning; "failure is a beginning." [15] [See also Needleman, at 18-21]. All students of craft must learn to experience failure (although there is little to suggest how this learning is to be embraced as one gets beyond routine failure).

We experience and know failure not only as novices but as experts, as practitioners, as elders. They too must ask: "How could this have happened?" "I thought I was on top of the situation." "Why didn't I catch that?" "I should have thought of that possibility." "How could that have slipped my mind?" With failure we are confronted with fundamental questions about the way we work and the way our work fails to meet the standards we set for it. "It is failure (and its emotional impact) that recall us to ourselves, bringing the gap between vision and action. . . ." [18]

Failure exposes a shadow side to the allure (and glamour) of craft work; it pushes us away from "an idealized picture of the craftsman at work." [13]. The ideal in professional work is often portrayed as an embodiment of steely detachment, precision, and objectivity. These ideals can, if we are not cautious, isolate us from our own experience. Needleman finds that in her ideal of the craft of pottery she has "left herself out," that her own habits and feelings had been too readily abandoned. [14]. Needleman would have us experience the failures so that we can return "to the vision, to examine it." [14]. Failure induces the willingness to re-examine first questions, to become again, a student of that which we had once hoped to master. It is failure and the days of despair that bring honesty to craft and truth to the quest for professionalism. It is the truth of failure that takes us back to the beginning, endowing craft with humility. And so it is, Needleman argues, that craft is "an education in failure, an education in the attitude toward failure. . . ." [15]

Failure can be found not only in mistakes and errors of judgment, but in the way we experience the world, in our inability to see the truth about our work and our lives. James Hillman writing about failure--he calls it pathology--says, "it's there all the time! The pathology [failure] is the place that keeps the person in the soul, the torment, that twist that you can't simply be naive, you can't simply go along in a natural way, that there's something broken, twisted, hurting, that forces constant reflection--and work." Failure and pathology, if I understand Hillman, keeps us closer to the soul of the work and our own soul as we take on the work.

Professional schools promote a rhetoric, images, and metaphors of success. The more we focus on success the more opportunity there is for denial and self-deception. Carla Needleman writes: "When I spoke of pottery in idealist terms of myself as a Potter, I began to hear little voices telling me it wasn't quite true, and I was ashamed. I had begun to realize that the obstacles to living the vision were in myself and that they were not a matter of technique." [13]

As we work in a profession, work to be competent and successful, work with proficiency and gain expertise, work efficiently and with others, we gain respect from colleagues and achieve material well-being. But we sometimes forget the intrinsic values associated with the work, spurred on by the allure of success.

If you cannot read the world and your own life with an appreciation of failure, you will constantly mis-read the world and perhaps your own life. Understanding the work of professionals, their practice and their education requires an understanding of failure. It will take a good bit of courage to look at our "comforting lies." [11]. Honesty hurts, but without honesty our work loses faith to the ideals that must ultimately guide it.

Ethics helps us see how failure works, in culture and in our own lives. I contend that the heart and soul of professional work becomes known to us as much by way of pathology--broken promises, empty rhetoric, false idealism, narrow and constricted professional roles, confused and banal conversations, numbing rituals--as it does by way of the markers of success. There is, then, something of value buried in the rubbish heap of our mistakes and failures, a record, a truthfulness about what happened (the black box flight recorder of a self that sometimes crashes).

Where does an educated way of seeing the failure in our lives (and our institutions) began? For Robert Pirsig it was the recognition that he had been "conned . . . into thinking that the real action was metropolitan" reached by main roads when the life to be lived along back roads. [Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values 13 (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1974]. And so Pirsig began to take the back roads:

We [Pirsig, his wife, and friends] took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole peace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They're not going anywhere. They're not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It's the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find. [13]

When we see how our lives are made and transformed by main road perspectives on success, we might begin to see the failure in fast-lane attitudes toward work. For example, Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [on-line excerpt], writes about motorcycle mechanics who are

[g]ood-natured, friendly, easygoing--and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there [to the shop] themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, 'I'm a mechanic.' At 5:00 m. or whatever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were . . . living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care. [34]

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