By Dr Muhammad Iqbal Uddin Arif
Education is the most reliable barometer of a society’s character. It shapes everyday conduct, informs professional ethics, conditions political behaviour, and ultimately underpins economic trajectories.
From routine social interactions to the conduct of state officials in national and international arenas, the quality of education is both revealed and reproduced.
Yet a critical fault line remains largely absent from our educational discourse: a deep-seated contradiction with the educational psychology that treats failure as a normal, even necessary, component of learning.
While the rhetoric of “failure as a stepping stone to success” is casually invoked, our system in practice stigmatizes failure, undermining resilience, innovation, and genuine intellectual growth.
Our education system remains entrenched in a reductive “numbers game” that equates excellence with top grades, privileging “straight-As” or “first divisions” as the sole markers of merit.
This metric-driven ethos extends beyond schooling into the job market and, most paradoxically, academia itself.
Regulatory frameworks and institutional by-laws, enforced by bodies such as the HEC, PEC, and PMDC, alongside university statutes, often require an unbroken record of success, rendering any instance of failure unacceptable, as is routinely evident in job advertisements, particularly for academic positions.
In doing so, the system disregards a crucial reality: individuals who falter yet persist, and ultimately excel, often develop greater resilience, adaptability, and intellectual maturity, enabling them to compete meaningfully with their “straight-A” counterparts.
By stigmatizing failure, it not only discourages perseverance but also fosters a sense of inferiority among students, with effects that extend beyond individuals to shape broader educational cultures and social behaviour.
This is especially consequential in contexts like ours, where students must navigate significant social and financial constraints that inevitably affect academic performance.
Moreover, the relentless pressure of the “numbers game” is closely linked to serious psychological distress among students and, in extreme cases, tragic outcomes such as self-harm and suicide following perceived academic failure.
To exclude those who demonstrate resilience and eventual excellence despite setbacks is therefore contrary to the very spirit of education, and ultimately counterproductive to its purpose.
This puritanical fixation on the “numbers game” and “straight-As” fosters perverse incentives that encourage academic malpractice, ranging from exam cheating and plagiarism to the commodification of assessment processes. Yet this is only part of the problem.
The same metric-driven logic extends into higher education, where faculty recruitment and promotion are often tied to the sheer quantity of publications rather than their quality or relevance.
Consequently, some academics seek to game the system, securing authorship through informal networks, reciprocal arrangements, or even financial transactions, at times with little or no substantive contribution to the work or alignment with its subject matter. Such practices not only erode academic integrity but also undermine the credibility of institutions.
The persistence of these patterns suggests systemic vulnerabilities that, upon even modest scrutiny, reveal the depth of distortion within the educational landscape.
History shows that many of the most influential scientists, philosophers, and statesmen were not defined by uninterrupted academic success but by their capacity to falter, adapt, and persevere. In contrast, “straight-A” trajectories are far less representative of those who have made enduring contributions to knowledge and society.
This underscores a critical point: failure is not a stigma but an integral component of intellectual and personal growth, particularly when accompanied by resilience and subsequent excellence.
Academic records alone cannot capture the constraints individuals have navigated, the struggles they have endured, or their full potential. To reduce selection and promotion criteria to grades is therefore both conceptually flawed and practically counterproductive.
An education system grounded in such narrow metrics risks deepening elitism, reinforcing social cleavages, and perpetuating a culture of inferiority. Meaningful reform is imperative, one that realigns educational structures with the principles of educational psychology and restores the broader, transformative purpose of education.
Authors’ Specialization: Governance & Public Policy
Associate Lecturer, University of Massachusetts Boston, US.
