고등학교 영어 독해와 작문 (NE능률 양현권) 연계 글

When a test goes badly, many people become their own harshest critics. They replay each error in their minds and repeat statements such as "I should have prepared more carefully" or "I should have known that answer." Behind this habit lies a common belief that blaming oneself is the price of improvement. Research in psychology, however, suggests that people are often more motivated to improve when they address a failure with kindness and understanding instead of harsh judgment.

The psychologist Kristin Neff, in a 2003 article, called this attitude self-compassion and described three parts of it. The first, self-kindness, replaces harsh judgment of oneself with gentleness and understanding in moments of pain or failure. The second, common humanity, counters isolation: a mistake is seen not as proof that one is uniquely flawed but as part of an experience all people share. The third, mindfulness, offers an alternative to endless brooding by holding painful thoughts and feelings in calm awareness.

In 2012, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, reported four experiments testing whether such an attitude strengthens the desire to improve. In one, students first struggled with a difficult test, and some were then encouraged to view their poor performance with understanding. Later, when the students could prepare for a second test, those who had received this encouragement studied longer than those in the other groups. In another experiment, people guided to view a recent wrongdoing with compassion reported stronger motivation to make amends and to avoid repeating it. Kindness toward oneself after a failure, these results suggest, may serve not as an excuse to stop trying but as a reason to try again.

Nearly twenty centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Epictetus taught a way of thinking that points in a similar direction. Born around the middle of the first century in Hierapolis, a Greek city in Asia Minor, he lived as a slave in Rome. Once freed, he taught philosophy in Rome until the emperor banished philosophers from Italy, and he then opened a school at Nicopolis in Greece. His student Arrian wrote down his lessons, and a short handbook drawn from them opens with a single distinction.

Everything a person encounters, the handbook says, belongs to one of two groups: what depends on us and what does not. Our judgments, our intentions, and what we choose to pursue or avoid belong to the first group, whereas our bodies, possessions, reputations, and public positions belong to the second. The first group is free by nature, since no one can block it, but the second is weak and in the hands of others. Anyone who mistakes the second kind for the first, Epictetus warned, will meet constant frustration and end up blaming gods and people alike.

The handbook also offers a test for a troubling impression: ask whether it concerns something that depends on us, and if not, treat it as none of our concern. Read in this light, a failed test has two sides: the grade already recorded no longer depends on the student, but preparation for the next test still does. A student who keeps thinking "I should have studied harder" gains little from repeating that regret and much from turning it into a plan. Improvement, in this view, begins not with harsh judgment of the past but with patient attention to what still lies within our reach.