By Amna Amir (Pakistan)
“We are producing scholars who can solve equations but cannot solve their own fears.”
Every year, schools celebrate exam toppers, children showing off shining medals, perfect report cards, or smiling faces on banners. Parents applaud, hoping that academic excellence secures a guaranteed future for their child. However, sentimental pictures capture a stark reality.
Many of these children are overwhelmed with pressure, anxiety, and fear. It creates high-achieving children with low emotional strength. In today’s world, a student is often judged by their GPA, not their character growth. We educate kids to solve equations, write essays, and memorize formulas. When it comes to rejection, disappointment, and emotional agony, we fail dramatically.
The World Health Organization reports that one in seven adolescents worldwide suffer from a mental ailment. It means emotional well-being is no longer a personal endeavor but has become a worldwide problem in education. The situation is even more tragic in Pakistan, where every other day, news coverage reveals another student suicides after low-scoring exams. Such incidents reveal the emotional void in our education system. Opting for academic success, it neglects emotional robustness diligently.
This problem starts early perhaps at home. The parents believe that they have given the child everything food, clothes, education but emotional nourishment or understanding never makes the list. The child is told something like, “be strong” or “stop crying” at 8. He or she is taught to brush feelings under the carpet rather than recognize or appreciate them.
This child, who never learns how to digest feelings, grows up to be a very successful professional lawyer, engineer, or doctor but is drowning in low self-esteem, high anxiety, and lack of rejection tolerance. Unfortunately, schools do the same, many schools focus on making the children disciplined and ensuring they get good grades
That is why emotional guidance should begin early in the foundational years of schooling. Children should be taught, perhaps not better, but in addition to using logic to identify and express their emotions. Emotional therapy where a child is even educated on normalcy and the relativity of emotions should become a norm.
A child who learns from an early age that not accepting you does not mean they would not make friends change how they relate the same way failure does not mean they are not good enough, but it does not stop forward movement because of its lack, though, has consequences, sometimes in a big way. Many have lost self-belief, and a fear that writes itself to the ends of their lives becomes born in them.
In words of Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and the author of Lean In, emotional intelligence is not a choice. It’s a requirement. It’s the ability to understand and manage your emotions. Emotional intelligence makes us resilient in the face of failure. It makes us aspire to save the world from one injustice at a time and to treasure relationships for the beautiful things they are: profoundly human.
It’s not a decision one has to make; you can get both academic excellence and emotional intelligence and a better tomorrow. But schools also need to embrace whole child’s education. Teachers must be trained to assess a child’s emotional disturbed status as seriously as their academic achievements. The classroom should be a place without judgment. Children must feel secure to voice confusion, despair, and fear of failure. Simple practice sessions can instigate open pupil discussions.
However, parents have a significant role to play. They must realize that mental health is not as foreign as physical health. A child’s silence does not make them stronger. A child will become better at what they do when hopeful parents encourage conversation. Each great achiever’s life is painted as a storied journey of obstacles that they overcame triumphantly. We must stop painting such tales. Building resilience should not necessitate suffering. All children should think of launching as a leap of faith, not a moving leap from trauma to freedom.
Ultimately, a truly successful child is not the one who tops the class but the one who learns to manage failure with dignity, seeks help when needed, and treats others with kindness. When emotional education is overlooked in schools, brilliant yet broken adults are created high achievers in public who fail miserably in silence. True education, therefore, should be more than high test scores and multiple trophies. It should be about nurturing empathy, resilience, and self-awareness.
A nation’s strength is not just in its intellectual IQ but in emotional maturity in how we love, connect, and heal. And this begins in early life. A child surrounded by understanding will grow in confidence, but one raised in silence will only learn survival. High scores without resilience are vacuous victories. It is time to reconsider success not just based on how much we know but how well we live, how we care, and how we rise when we fall. Without roots in emotion, education is not education.
