We are all victims of a society that frown frantically upon failure. You make a mistake, you’re mocked at, punished and left behind to lick your wound of embarrassment… A sad reality quite common in the educational sector. Right from childhood, the school system has conditioned our mind to fear failure.

The approach to a student that fails eventually cripple the mind and starve it of any possible motivation to be more, to do more and become better. This approach and many similar punishment policies are what has breed cheating and make malpractices to thrive like weed…We were meant to see failure as a sickness, one worst that leprosy. We were meant to dread it instead of embrace it and utilize for our own betterment.

Students who failed were stratified into a category of nonentities, taking the shine from them and make them subconsciously believe they can’t be better…Young ones grow into adulthood with this mindset. Whether in business, marriage, relationship, you name it.

The perspective with which failure is looked upon is the same thing! Such mindset even breeds inferiority complex and a better part of low self-esteem…We see ourselves as a failure in comparison with a successful colleague; someone who has got it all right and never had any failure in their scorecards. This was what we were meant to believe. But as the saying goes: “what separates a successful man from the rest is the amount of failure he has experienced and how he has developed from them.”

What have you done vs what do you want to do about it?

As an educator, i don’t posit that whoever fails, especially in the school setting should be given a pat on the back, no, neither should they be victimized. We should stop asking ‘what have you done?’ To make it seem making a mistake is the end of it all. Instead, we should ask ‘what do you want to do about it?’..What do you want to do about your mistakes, your failure.

Do you want to sit and cry over it or learn from it and use it to become better?..This approach puts the person in question in a reconditioned state of mind. To help them realize that failure is in itself is not a bad thing. That success actually is repeated failures worked upon…It is my wish that as educators, we begin to see failure in a new light and encourage mistake in the course of our duties.