Despite failure being a part and parcel of life, in the education sector, students are often extremely fearful of experiencing it.
While exams are meant to assess the students’ learning, its implementation has caused significant negative feelings. It looks as though education is no longer driven by curiosity or a sense of exploration. Rather, it’s driven by fear of failure.
Even so, not all hope is lost. Several points can be taken:
The fear of failure stems from the need for approval by others.
One’s identity is not based on academic achievements.
People have differing talents: the one who may not be studious would excel elsewhere.
Recognise that we learn everyday, and some lessons? We learn them better than others.
To add a personal touch to this post, I can relate to the fear of failure and the actual experience. In a subject that I wished to excel during my school days, I failed miserably. For years, I was upset about it and while no one seemed to remember after a while, it stuck with me.
Today, I realise that coming out from that failure did good for me. While it may not seem wonderful to fail (for we all should aspire to succeed, instead), oftentimes we learn more through failure than a string of unchallenged successes. So use your failures as a stepping stone to where you want to be in the future. It may seem bleak now, but in the future, you would realise that failure can be a good friend after all.
In a perfectly acceptable sense of the human world, failure is a part of life. However, it should be emphasized that ‘without darkness, there could be no light’. It proves the point that while failure is something everyone had learned to avoid, it should also be seen as a crucial part of self-growth.