[Note: Second in a series of commentaries on understanding and reforming education. In the first commentary, I suggested that much of the time we spend in school is a waste of time. The point of this one is that schools create failures precisely because they try to, and do, create winners!]

It is clearly not the intention of schools to create failure. In fact, they have created remarkable successes!

It’s also not that the vast majority of teachers don’t strive to contribute to the success of students.

But it is precisely the nature of the system itself: If you have a winner or success, by default, you must also have losers or failure!

Let’s take a look at this. When you take a test, you either pass or fail. You either pass or fail a subject. You pass or fail elementary school, high school, college and graduate school. You can even fail your doctoral dissertation!

You pass or fail getting a job because you passed or failed in these school stages.

The system has numerical, or alphabetical rankings: A or B = Winners. C = Average. D = Almost loser. F = Loser.

Is it possible that after years of hearing “average” or “failure” applied to them, kids/people might think of themselves as simply average — or failures? Because they create a culture of success, they create a culture of failure.

I don’t think it has to be this way. Education seems to be based on the model of competition in sports.

Teams compete to win. In order for one team to win, the other has to lose. That is what, by definition, games of competition are.

Perhaps it goes back to caveman days where the real game wasn’t a game: It was kill or be killed!

Why do we maintain this barbarous custom in our schools today? Does schooling have to be competition?

No teacher who is in a school system is trying to create failures. But they are trapped in the system that forces them to do it. It is called the grading system!

What would it take for us to get the concept, the word, “failure” out of education? What would it take to create competence without creating competition? How could we define success so that every student would be a success?

Thankfully, many teachers in many schools are already aware of this and are working for what’s best for each student. Going back a century to Montessori education and even before, many new and innovative systems are introduced regularly, in order to do what’s best for each student.

Many teachers strive valiantly to do this within the current system. But they are constrained by a system that unwittingly denies success as well as creating it.

I leave you with five questions for your homework assignment:

1. How would you define “success,” so that it would be achievable by every child?

2. What would have to happen in order for that to happen?

3. Wouldn’t that be different for each child?

4. If so, how would we measure it, grade it?

5. Most important, why?

Teachers, you might read this article and its questions to your class and see how they respond. Parents, ask these questions of your schoolchildren. Schoolchildren, ask these questions of your parents.

Here is a story to finish:

Johnny woke up one day and said: “Mom, I hate school and I am not going to go today.” … “But you have to go!” … “Give me one good reason why.” … “First of all, you are 42 years old, and second, you are the principal!”