My name is Angela Self, and I am a junior at Frontier Regional High School.

As I have progressed through my education in the small town of Conway, I have begun to become aware of a major problem that affects children in both the classroom and at home.

It is the simple fact that children are no longer allowed to fail. At school, the thought of receiving a C or lower causes many teenagers to enter a panic-induced state of mind. In the eyes of the grading system anyone who cannot retain above 70 percent of the assessed material is deemed a “failure.”

Often this inability to grasp complicated concepts or answer test questions to the teacher’s satisfaction is mistaken as a character defect, such as laziness or stupidity.

I have watched this process happen often enough (luckily, though, I have never found myself to be on the receiving end of these bad marks) and almost always the struggling student is repeatedly reprimanded for their inability to improve with more grades that indicate failure.

They and anyone else who fails to receive good marks are told that this one failure will lead to a lifetime of failures. The student is told that they will not go on to college, which means they will work at a low-paying job and live a life of poverty and misery.

Over the fact that they had difficulty memorizing the dates of the battles of the Civil War or graphing a conic section in calculus.

This fear of failure is enough to keep the majority of the students in-line and continuing to work until the late hours of the night — at the expense of their mental health.

At home, failure in extracurriculars, especially sports, is not tolerated by parents. No longer are there winners — only participants. Everyone receives a ribbon. Everyone makes the team.

Denying children the ability to fail at a young age renders them inept at dealing with failure appropriately later in life. They will not have been given the tools to understand that failing is a part of life and that it is necessary in order to move forward and become a better person.

Angela Self

Conway