Fear of failure

Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain or a threat.

An experience no one on this earth can avoid is fear. It's an emotion that brings out the best, and worst in people. Fear has the capability to push us to the limits of our comfort zone. Most of the time, fear forces us to act instinctively, instead of logically. Fear also goes through quite the change as we get older. In other words, we start to worry about different things as we age. As a kid, fear is typically a dark room with the closet open, or monster movies. But for teenage fears, they are a lot more realistic. Fears for teenagers  range from girls, to acceptance, to confusion, the unknown, and most of all, to failure. Failure has been proven to be teenagers number one fear along side the fear of loss. Why is this? It very well could be because we live in a society that is competition based and failure is spotlighted to heavily on teenagers. We can see examples all over the media stating that girls have to be thin and good looking, while boys have to be muscular and 'manly'. This puts an enormous amount of subliminal pressure on young minds. So much so that it ingrains this image into young people's understanding of how things should be.
This fear of failure isn't just in the media. It's also very common in schools. Actually, it's very obvious in schools. For starters, schools judge student's work with an 'F' for failure. The education system starts implementing this way of grading very early on in a young persons life. Which means that we start forming a fear for failure early. Which also means, that failure would now be a foundational fear for someone. What I mean by this is that because we have had this notion of fear in our lives at an early age, it's going to be very hard to get rid of it as we grow older. It's the same thing for fears of heights, snakes, roller-coasters. People mostly have these fears because they had a bad experience with them at an early age when their mind was fragile and susceptible.
Fear of failure is also the number one reason of procrastination. If students feel like their behaviours are self-determined or they feel lively, they procrastinate less. But most student are not self-motivated. In fact most student are extrinsically motivated (working for a grade rather for the betterment of themselves). This will create a higher fear of failure which, in turn, turns into more procrastination and eventual lower grades. Could this be justification that grades actually make kids achieve less in school? Maybe. But point here is that schools are putting a huge damper on their reputation by having students fear school. There is also another argument that students learn more outside of school because they aren't restricted or feeling the pressure of grades.
Implementing this fear of failure into students has very prevalent repercussions as they mature. I believe the school system as to critically revaluate themselves and find an approach that is different from what it has been for the last trillion years. We live in a new and different era even from ten years ago, so why do we use a system of educating that is not appealing to students? This may be because people fear change. But that's a whole other argument to discuss later.