"Failure is not an option." well, it is.

We have reshaped the education system—largely through federal legislation—to an approach of "right answers, right answers, right answers." But life's not like that. We're putting a tremendous amount of value on being able to pick the right one out of four little bubbles. But this turns out not to be a very valuable skill. You can't take this skill out into the workplace and get paid for it.
My research assistant did a blog for the Washington Post about this mantra of "Failure Is Not an Option." Her point was, you can't learn anything unless you fail. Failure has to be an option. What does success mean if there's no failure? It just means that you've dropped the bar so low that everyone can walk over it.

That is Diane Ravitch speaking of her Damascene conversion of sorts on public education and No Child Left Behind.  I am reminded of Robert McNamara admitting much later in life about how wrong he was on the Vietnam War.
Finally, ...

If you could hear someone else interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?
That's a hard one. Donald Rumsfeld said he was wrong, but I don't even want to hear from him. [Former Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs Co-Chair, and former Citigroup Chair] Bob Rubin would be interesting, but he'll never admit he was wrong. Right now what's coming to mind are people who have never admitted that they're wrong about anything.
Like who?
Like basically everybody I've been associated with for the last 20 years.

Highly educated does not mean best managers

Way back on May 2nd, in response to a colleague's comments, I emailed him that highly educated people don't necessarily make good executives--in the private or public sector. In that email, I wrote:

"W" is double Ivy-League, and pretty much everyone of his cabinet members is highly educated. Ken Lay was a phd in econ. Only Karl Rove does not have a formal college degree! ..... Robert "Vietnam" McNamara was a high IQ genious, with the best credentials.
In the US, and in many other countries, the educated have created as much (or more) hassles as the not-formally-educated. one of the best leaders we had in the state where I grew up in India was functionally illiterate ....
I am increasingly tending towards an understanding that higher education is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for governance, politics, civics ....

Well, this is the same idea that Frank Rich discusses in his column, whose title says it all:
"The brightest are not always the best"