Education and our fear of failure

When we are scared of failing, this fear often stems from something, or is exacerbated in a certain environment.

For me, this ‘thing’ in which my fear of failure is the greatest, is my experience of education. 

Throughout our educational lives, we are tested and categorised in one way or another. Whether that is by the number of gold stars on our classroom’s chart, categorising us according to how well behaved and successful we are at the ripe age of 5, all the way through to the real deal, the exams themselves.

Suffering from anxiety and the perfectionism, negative self talk and general lack of optimism that comes with it, made me, unintentionally, the perfect example of a student who worked tirelessly, always aimed for top grades and behaved perfectly in class. On paper I was a ‘perfect’ student. But at what cost?

Well, for me,  failure in education categorises me as a failure in life. My fear of failing academically is so great that it dominates my university experience. It’s all I can think of some days.

I have been interested in finding out other peoples’ opinions on the matter, so I created some twitter polls.

Unsurprisingly, out of 29 people, 96% admitted to having a fear of failure, and, shockingly, out of 23 people, 91.3% stated that this fear of failure came from education.

This, to me, came as a huge surprise. Most of us have a fear of failure in some aspect of our lives, but for most people to admit that this fear circulated around education really highlights something.

The final poll I ran produced the most shocking and interesting results. I displayed four grades: A, B, C and D. Now, in the UK education system, none of these actually equate to a fail. An ungraded (U) would mean the student had failed. However, after asking ‘which of these grades would you consider to make you a failure?’ out of 24 people, 25% said B, 41.7% said C and 33.3% said D. 

Surely this shows us something very significant!

As a grade, B is the second highest after A/A*, yet for some participants to state that had they received this grade, they would feel like a failure really highlights something crucial about the educational system in which we live.

Failing doesn’t have to mean a huge red ‘F’ on our work. Our relationship with failure is so much more complex than this. In this case, people seem to deem anything other than the highest possible grade a failure to some extent.

How do you feel about failure and education? I’d love to hear your experiences!