At St. John’s, it’s not what you think. Or rather, it is, but that particular word is in such common currency, both here and elsewhere, as to have lost most semantic value. The real “F” word here is “failure.”
Because of a fear of it, the intellectual climate here is more averse to risk-taking than it was, say, twenty years or so ago. A number of people think that such an aversion is a problem, yet the behavior of students, parents, and faculty tends to promote it.
There are times that after all your preparation, success requires a leap in the dark. The truth is that these leaps are *not* always successes, so it’s both foolish and counterproductive to pretend they are. Which gets back to the point that if you want to encourage people to take risks, they need to have a base level of confidence (which can’t be complete or it’s foolhardiness) and a graceful path to return from failure if you want them to learn anything from the failure except “Don’t do this again!”
