Erasers are a common enough pencil case accessory, up there with the pencil sharpener, fountain pen, highlighter and biro.

For some students, they are purely functional, there to rub away any mistakes they may have made or simply because they’re not happy with what it is they have produced.

Others are more passionate about rubbers, as they are commonly referred to; partial to building up a collection of sorts (some they use, others they don’t).

For the most part, no-one really thinks much about them. They are what they are, so to speak, and what else is there to say about them?

Well, it turns out, quite a lot. A cognitive scientist has, in an interview with the Telegraph, referred to erasers as “an instrument of the devil”.

Guy Claxon, a visiting professor of education at King’s College London, has a very serious point in what may be perceived as an exaggerated claim.

“The eraser is an instrument of the devil because it perpetuates a culture of shame about error,” he told the newspaper. “It’s a way of lying to the world, which says ‘I didn’t make a mistake. I got it right first time.’

“That’s what happens when you can rub it out and replace it. Instead, we need a culture where children are not afraid to make mistakes.”

Professor Claxon said that in such an environment, where people are exposed to errors they have made, a shift in responses will occur.

Instead of feeling bad upon seeing a blooper, youngsters will instead feel inspired to learn from their mistakes and aim to reflect and improve on what they have done.

“They need to be interested in the process of getting the right answer because that’s what it is like in the big, wide world,” he added.

“Ban the eraser, get a big road sign with an eraser and put a big, red bar across it and get kids to say you don’t scrub out your mistakes - highlight them because mistakes are your friends, they are your teachers.”

Commenting on the cognitive scientist’s advice, Anouchka Grose, a psychologist and author of Are You Considering Therapy? and The Teenage Vegetarian Survival Guide, said the proposition was not a bad idea.

Writing in the Guardian, she remarked how in her youth, she was something of a “connoisseur of erasers”. Back then though, she would never have thought of them “in terms of good and evil”.

Until now, that is. Sure, Professor Claxon's remark may not be as literal as it sounds, but, as the psychologist acknowledges, there is something profound to what he is saying. Getting to grips with failure is an important life lesson.

“Claxton seems to be speaking about a special brand of neoliberal failure whose ultimate objective is success,” she noted in her article for the newspaper.

“The paradoxical sort of failure invoked by Wimbledon High School, a top London school for girls, where during its ‘Failure Week’ in 2012, pupils were given the courage to fail by being shown YouTube videos detailing the failures people suffered before they became extremely famous and successful.”

While we imagine that most schools will refrain from putting in place an outright eraser ban, it is likely that it will give some school teachers pause for thought. We could all do with being comfortable with making mistakes. To err is human, as the saying goes.