I waited as eagerly as thousands of other people this January, for the Matric results, and was delighted to find the pass mark for the young girl that I was looking out for.
fail exam
However many people experienced disappointment with their results. Some teenagers failed their school leavers’ exams and once they have dealt with that disappointment, they are going to have to make some difficult decisions about their immediate future.
But there is yet another side to this story, and one so horribly and vividly illustrated but the suicide of a young girl on the same day her results were made known. She was found hanging in her home, with the newspaper and her cellphone both declaring her failure to pass.
What made this child imagine that her life was not worth living because she did not pass a set of high school exams? Was her self worth so tied up to symbols on a paper that she could not live with her future if those symbols were the wrong ones? And how vulnerable is her self worth then, when we are aware that more than 40 out of the 50 or so papers that were written this past year, actually had their marks adjusted by the adjudicating process?
Have we as a society allowed our children to believe that these exams are so important that they must define their future and put their entire lives at risk?
I do not believe in pretending to pass someone in order to not hurt their feelings. A ‘deferred pass’ is meaningless and undermines a person’s self image even more when they realize that they are being humored. But there is a way to communicate to a child that they have failed to achieve what was required in order to take the next step. That failure means that either the child did not learn, the teacher did not teach or the material was inappropriate. In any case, a failure has been experienced and must be addressed. It cannot be whitewashed over with platitudes.
But in no way does it mean that it is worth the life of a person when they do not achieve what was expected.
We all fail, daily, and it is time we face that fact and teach our children how to deal with it too. Accepting it does not mean settling. It means addressing it and finding a way to grow beyond wherever we are failing at the moment. Failure without learning is defeat, whereas a failure where you have learned and grown and moved forward, is a treasured experience, eventually.
