Kids make mistakes and the sun rises in the east. The first half of these epiphanies brought to you by the New York Times. But mistakes today aren’t like the mistakes of yore.

These days I work as the senior communications officer at another college, where I spend a healthy fraction of my time dealing with students who’ve made mistakes of their own. I recognize myself in them: intellectually adventurous, skeptical, newly aware of life’s injustices. They’re also different from me in many ways: less Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, much more technology.

Today’s students live their lives so publicly — through the technology we provide them without training — that much simpler errors than mine earn them the wrath of the entire internet.

Whether it’s true that the complication is tech “we provide them without training” is one issue. Some of us offered “training,” but they weren’t buying. Not only do they insist on putting their every burp and fart on instagram, as if we could stop them, but they also insist on the world learning of their every thought. They have opinions. They’re brilliant. They are entitled to make sure everyone knows it, and they are entitled to have their brilliance respected. 

Except when they aren’t.

Usually, the outrage is over things they say, for example a campus newspaper editorial that grapples with balancing free speech and appropriate behavior. That’s a quandary that has occupied American legal theorists since the founding of the country. It’s certainly one any young citizen should think through.

Actually, that isn’t a quandary at all, and legal theorists have other things to worry about. But hey, you’re not a lawyer, and nobody would expect you to have a clue what you’re talking about, even though the New York Times gave you real estate to say something ridiculously wrong. And this isn’t about you, but about the foolish kids anyway.

But last year, when Wellesley’s student paper ran an editorial wrestling with this same idea — and advocating limits on hate speech — it was widely read and criticized in the media as if it were enormously consequential.

Were the authors’ arguments entirely mature and well reasoned? No. But students deserve the chance to try out ideas. When they do, sometimes they’re going to botch it — sometimes spectacularly. And that’s why we have learning spaces.

Perhaps the problem had nothing to do with the op-ed being “enormously consequential,” but rather reflecting enormous ignorance on the part of college students whose minds were being turned into social justice mush by academics and college administrators who were taking their tuition money and turning kids into ideological idiots.

And that’s why we have “learning spaces,” whatever that means.

Ironically, the student editors who wrote that misguided editorial have matured, whereas Jim Reische, the Chief Communications officer at Williams College and former college flunk-out, is just as dumb as he was when he was arrested for vandalism.

Since we just served as editor in chief and senior editors of The Williams Record, Williams College’s independent student newspaper, Jim Reische’s article struck a chord with us.

That mistake transformed how we tackle polarizing issues. The following semester, we published an editorial criticizing Williams’s president, Adam Falk, for canceling a controversial student-invited speaker. We saw tangible improvements in the board’s navigation of those difficult conversations: We respectfully challenged our peers’ opinions; we critically considered our own. Our editorial decisions, as the paper’s leaders for 2017, were not governed by fear of criticism, but rather an appreciation of it.

As a result of their childishly wrong op-ed, they learned better. The point of kids being able to make mistakes isn’t to hide from them, give them a tummy rub and tell them that they’re wonderful and all the mean people who criticize them are awful haters who should die in hell. The point is to come away from a mistake better than you went in.

It’s very unfortunate that it took the weight of the outside world to teach the editors of the Williams  Record that the brilliant ideas floating around inside their kiddie noggins were terribly foolish and wrong. But as Reische makes clear, they never would have learned better at Williams, where they would have gotten a safe space to bask in their ignorance.

What we learned stuck with us as editors, and as young adults. We echo Mr. Reische’s hope that other students have the same opportunity to make mistakes — and be better for it.

Much as Reische’s hope may be in the right place, his solution suggests that Williams College will be just as worthless a source of knowledge as it was when the editors wrote their shit-for-brains op-ed. Had the editors been taken into the puppy room and given Play-Doh, they never would have learned better. Had it been left to Reische, chances are they would have learned nothing.