We spend a lot of time in education talking about success. We measure it with test scores, GPAs, and college acceptance letters. But we rarely talk about one of the most critical ingredients for achieving that success: the freedom to fail.

So many of our students, particularly young people of color, are paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong. They exist in a high-stakes environment where one bad grade or one misstep feels like a permanent mark against their potential. The pressure to be perfect is immense, and it stifles the very things we claim to want for them—creativity, innovation, and resilience.

The common response from well-meaning educators is to create "safe spaces." The intention is good, but the approach is flawed. A designated room or a specific club that is labeled "safe" inherently suggests that the world outside of it is not. It treats safety as a location, not a culture. A student can’t carry a room with them into a high-stakes exam or a challenging project.

This is why we need to stop focusing on building safe spaces and start cultivating a universal feeling of safeness.

Safeness is not a place; it's a psychological state. It’s the deep-seated knowledge that you can take an intellectual risk, try something new, and fall short without it threatening your value as a person or your place in the community. Safeness is the security to be vulnerable, to ask the "dumb" question, to submit the draft you know isn't perfect, and to see the feedback as a tool for growth, not a judgment of your worth.

This is the essence of educational liberation.

Liberation in the classroom means freeing students from the oppressive structures that hold them back. The fear of failure is one of the most powerful of those structures. When we liberate students from that fear, we give them permission to truly learn. We shift the goal from avoiding mistakes to learning from them. Failure ceases to be an indictment and becomes data—valuable information on the path to mastery.

How do we build this culture of safeness?

It starts with us. We have to model it. We must be willing to admit when we don't know an answer or when we've made a mistake. We need to reframe our language in the classroom. Instead of asking, "Why did you get this wrong?" we should be asking, "What did you learn from trying it that way?"

It also means moving toward competency-based and project-based work, where the emphasis is on the process, the iteration, and the growth—not just the final product. When a student presents a project, the conversation should be about their journey, the challenges they overcame, and what they’d do differently next time. That is where the real learning happens.

Our role as educators is not to build a bubble-wrapped world where students never experience setbacks. Our role is to build young people with the strength and confidence to meet those setbacks, learn from them, and keep moving forward.

Creating a culture of safeness isn't an add-on; it's fundamental. It's how we empower students not just to get the right answers on a test, but to find the right answers for the complex challenges they will face in their lives. That is the true measure of a liberatory education.