There’s a paradox at the heart of education that makes many people uncomfortable: for a school system to truly work, it must allow students to fail. Not because failure is the goal, but because the possibility of failure is what gives success its meaning and students their motivation to perform.
Walk into almost any school today and you’ll hear a lot of talk about growth mindsets, celebrating effort, and ensuring every child feels successful. These aren’t bad ideas in themselves, but somewhere along the way, many school systems have conflated supporting students with shielding them from the consequences of not meeting standards. The result is an educational environment where grades become increasingly divorced from actual learning, where minimum effort yields the same credential as maximum effort, and where students graduate without truly knowing what they’re capable of achieving.
The fundamental problem is this: when failure becomes impossible, performance becomes optional. If a student knows they’ll advance to the next grade regardless of whether they master the material, if they understand that missed assignments can always be made up without penalty, if they’ve learned that every assessment comes with unlimited retakes until they stumble into a passing grade, then the incentive structure of education collapses. Learning becomes something that happens to other people, those strange individuals who care about knowledge for its own sake. For everyone else, school becomes a waiting game, a series of hoops to step through rather than jump over.
This isn’t about being cruel or dismissive toward students who struggle. Quite the opposite. When we eliminate the possibility of failure, we eliminate the feedback mechanism that tells students where they actually stand. A student who receives a failing grade on a test learns something crucial: their current approach isn’t working. They need to study differently, seek help, or fundamentally reconsider their effort level. Remove that signal and you leave students wandering in the dark, potentially unaware they’re falling behind until the gaps in their knowledge become chasms that no amount of social promotion can bridge.
Consider what happens in systems where failure has real consequences. In medical schools, students must demonstrate genuine competence because lives will eventually depend on their knowledge. In aviation training, pilots must meet exacting standards because passengers trust them with their safety. In apprenticeship programs, craftspeople must show real skill because their reputation and livelihood depend on the quality of their work. These high-stakes environments don’t produce perfection, but they do produce practitioners who understand that performance matters and who have developed the habits and discipline necessary to meet demanding standards.
Now consider what happens when schools remove these stakes. Students quickly learn to optimize not for learning but for getting by. They become experts at identifying the minimum viable effort, skilled at managing teacher expectations, adept at working the system rather than working on themselves. Some students will perform anyway because of internal motivation or external pressure from families, but many others will coast along collecting credentials that increasingly mean nothing to future employers or colleges who discover these students can’t actually do what their transcripts claim.
The defense of no-failure policies often rests on concerns about student self-esteem and mental health. These concerns aren’t trivial, but they’re based on a misunderstanding of how resilience develops. Self-esteem that comes from genuine achievement, from overcoming real challenges and meeting legitimate standards, is robust and lasting. Self-esteem that comes from inflated grades and unearned advancement is fragile because at some level, students know it’s not real. They know they haven’t truly earned it, and this knowledge breeds anxiety and impostor syndrome far more toxic than the temporary disappointment of a failing grade would have caused.
There’s also an equity argument worth considering. When schools eliminate failure, they disproportionately harm students who lack advantages outside the classroom. Wealthy students have parents who can hire tutors, provide educational enrichment, and navigate the college admissions process. They have safety nets that catch them when school standards slip. Students from less privileged backgrounds depend on schools to clearly signal what they need to learn and to hold them to standards that will prepare them for future success. When schools abandon this responsibility in the name of compassion, they’re actually perpetuating inequality while wrapping it in the language of care.
Making failure possible doesn’t mean making failure common or celebrating when students fall short. It means establishing clear standards, providing support and instruction to help students meet those standards, and then honestly assessing whether students have done so. It means being willing to tell a student they haven’t mastered algebra and need to take the course again rather than pushing them into geometry where they’ll drown. It means giving grades that reflect actual performance rather than effort, attendance, or behavior. It means understanding that sometimes the most caring thing a teacher can do is deliver bad news early when there’s still time to address it.
This requires courage from educators and school systems because it means accepting that not all students will succeed on the first try, that some parents will be angry, that test scores and graduation rates might initially decline. It means trusting that honest assessment and real standards will ultimately serve students better than the comfortable fiction that everyone is succeeding all the time.The goal isn’t to make school into a brutal sorting mechanism that crushes struggling students. The goal is to make it an environment where effort matters, where performance has consequences, and where success means something because failure was genuinely possible. That’s not only how education works best, it’s how students develop into adults who understand that meeting standards, fulfilling obligations, and performing well aren’t optional features of life but essential ones.
In the end, preparing students for the real world means creating school environments that share at least some characteristics with that real world. And in the real world, performance matters. Jobs can be lost, opportunities can be missed, and failure is always lurking as a possibility that makes success worth pursuing. Schools that pretend otherwise aren’t protecting students from harsh realities; they’re ensuring students will be blindsided by them later when the stakes are higher and the safety nets are fewer. The kindest thing we can do for students is prepare them for a world where they’ll need to perform, and that preparation requires letting them experience both failure and success while they’re still in an environment designed to help them learn from both.
