Best Lessons Are Learnt Through Bitter Experiences

On 27 January 1967 a fire swept through the cabin of Apollo 1 during a ground test at Cape Kennedy, killing the astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee within seconds. The capsule had a hatch that opened inward and could not be forced against the pressure inside, and a cabin filled with pure oxygen. After the investigation, the hatch was redesigned to open outward quickly, flammable materials were removed, and the pure oxygen atmosphere was abandoned for launch. The Apollo spacecraft that carried men to the moon was safer because of that fire. The topic claims that the best lessons come from experiences of this kind, and the essay asks in what sense that is so.

Fields that handle risk have turned the idea into an institution. Every serious air accident is investigated by specialists whose purpose is to find the cause and not the culprit, and their findings are circulated to every airline in the world. The flight data recorder, the checklist and the rules on crew communication are the scars of earlier crashes. The result is one of the great success stories of modern safety, since flying is now among the safest ways to travel, and its safety was built accident by accident.

India's own record shows the pattern. The gas leak at Bhopal in December 1984 killed thousands, and in 1986 Parliament passed the Environment Protection Act, which gave the government broad powers to regulate industrial hazards. The tsunami of December 2004 killed many thousands on the Indian coast, and by 2007 the country had its own tsunami early warning centre in Hyderabad, which now sends alerts to the Indian Ocean region. In both cases the loss was horrific, and the institution that followed has saved lives that no one will ever count.

Psychology offers a reason for the force of such lessons. In a widely cited review in 2001, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues concluded that bad events tend to have a stronger effect than good ones of equal size, that criticism stings more than praise pleases and that losses loom larger than gains. The brain seems built to remember what hurt. A burn teaches a child about fire more completely than a hundred warnings, and the memory of a failed examination can shape a student's habits for years. Bitterness carries information that comfort does not, because it marks the boundary of what the world will tolerate.

Bitterness carries information that comfort does not, because it marks the boundary of what the world will tolerate.

Yet experience alone is a poor teacher. In experiments on learned helplessness in the 1960s, Martin Seligman and his colleagues found that animals exposed to shocks they could not escape stopped trying to escape even when escape became possible. The lesson they learned was false, and it kept them suffering. People can behave the same way after repeated failure, deciding that nothing they do will matter. A bitter experience can also teach too much, as when a person who was cheated once decides never to trust anyone, or too little, as when a driver who survives a near miss concludes that he is a good driver.

John Dewey drew the right conclusion in his book Experience and Education in 1938, when he argued that experience educates only when it is reflected on and connected to later action. Pain is raw material, and the teaching comes from the sorting. The air accident investigator, the doctor who reviews a death on the ward and the student who reads through a wrong answer are all doing the sorting. Without it, bitterness leaves only a scar, and with it the scar becomes a map.

A teacher can use the same idea in a classroom without causing harm. Mathematics teachers who allow students to attempt a hard problem and fail before they are shown the method often find that the method sticks better afterwards, because the student now knows exactly what the method is for. Coaches use it too, since a batter who is dismissed while attempting an ambitious stroke learns the limits of the shot faster than any lecture could teach him. This is bitterness in a small and safe dose, a failure that is real enough to hurt a little and small enough to repeat, and it may be the most useful form of the principle in education. The art lies in making the experience costly enough to be remembered and cheap enough to survive. A good teacher learns to judge that balance for each student, since the failure that sharpens one child can crush another.

This also suggests that a wise society does not need to suffer every disaster itself. Doctors learn from case studies of other doctors' errors, engineers from the failures of other bridges and citizens from the histories of other nations. Literature is another way of borrowing bitterness cheaply. A reader of Anna Karenina or the Mahabharata can live through betrayal, war and regret without losing anything, and some of the lesson crosses the page. The point of such learning is to move the lesson forward in time, so that the cost is paid once by the few who endured it and not again by everyone who comes after.

The weakness of that approach is that secondhand lessons are thin. People ignore warnings that they have not felt, and each generation tends to need some of its own pain to believe what its elders said. The memory of the Great Depression shaped the behaviour of those who lived through it for decades, and the financial crises of recent times arrived when that generation had left. Institutions can store lessons in rules and checklists, but they can also forget them when the rules begin to feel like obstacles.

If the best lessons really need bitterness, then a life or a society that avoids all of it may never become wise, and yet no one can responsibly choose suffering for the sake of learning. It remains unclear whether lessons taught by others can ever be as deep as lessons lived, and the answer matters for every parent who has watched a child walk toward a mistake that she herself would give a great deal to have avoided.